709: Steel-Cable Insurance
17 Sep 2026A mountain of follow-up and updates about the iPhone event, new chips, iPhone 18 Pro, and iPhone Duo.
Episode Description:
- 🗣️ New ATP Member’s Special: ATP Insider: Show Q&A
- 🗣️ It’s St. Jude time! 🗣️
- Todd Vaziri on James Bond homages in the event video
- Making of (via Techzha)
- Preliminary Geekbench scores
- iPhone 18 Pro Max & Apple C2
- Solar phone charging? 🤔 (via flanker)
- Aperture blades on iPhone 18 Pro / Pro Max camera
- iPhones 18 Pro Face ID (YouTube timestamp link to 13m34s)
- iPhone Duo
- How will iPhone Mirroring work?
- No Action Button 💔
- The Duo does have a split keyboard
- An aside about our enthusiasm for the Duo
- Ternus & Joz interview part 1 & part 2
- Stephen Robles insights
- A Face ID complication (via Pedro Fernandes)
- Apple Pencil support
- Fake bezel
- Benjamin Mayo at 9to5Mac
- Demo video (Twitter link)
- iOS 27 doesn’t include automated password changing
- Photos libraries on external drives (via Mike Brogan & Jason Snell)
Optimize Storage(via Jason Snell & Fabrice Neuman)- John’s cheap S3 setup
- Configuration
- CLI invocation:
aws s3api put-bucket-lifecycle-configuration \ --bucket my-cool-bucket-name \ --lifecycle-configuration file:///Users/yourusername/Desktop/s3-lifecycle.json \ --transition-default-minimum-object-size varies_by_storage_class
- _DavidSmith on iPhone Air & 17e sales
- Gruber’s breakdown
- iPhone 17: 36.5%
- iPhone 17 Pro Max: 29.9%
- iPhone 17 Pro: 29.4%
- iPhone 17e: 2.5%
- iPhone Air: 1.5%
- Gruber’s breakdown
- Post-show: John needed Marco’s 3D printer
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The triumphant return of the Genius Bar?
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Chapters
- Casey’s discovery
- ATP Insider: Show Q&A
- Donate to St. Jude
- iPhone-event video production
- New Geekbench scores
- C2 or Qualcomm?
- Under-screen solar panels?
- Sponsor: Claude
- Variable-aperture camera 🖼️
- Under-screen Face ID illuminator
- More on iPhone Duo
- Sponsor: Granola
- Ternus/Joz interview
- More Duo stuff
- Sponsor: Zocdoc
- iOS 27.0 omissions
- Photo libraries on externals
- Managing “Optimize Storage”
- John’s S3 setup
- iPhone Air market share
- Ending theme
- Preparing the way
Casey’s discovery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had been looking to see whether or not my VIN number for my Volkswagen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had been listed online for sale. And it hadn't been. I've been checking every other day or so because I'm me and I like to know these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I'm curious. There is no good, no good can come from this. It's I just find it interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was curious what they were going to list it for. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but how, okay, there's only one way this can go. Like, they're not going to list it for below what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, of course. So they're going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to list it for some amount of money that is above what they paid you. And the only thing that can possibly do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is make you feel bad that they didn't pay you enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so on paper, especially when we're talking about me, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey However, however, first of all, I'm needy and I just want to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And second of all, I I feel like I had done the best I could do short of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a private sale, right? I had surveyed a couple of different options. I kind of sort of, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was my own choice, but I kind of sort of wanted to do it with a quickness. And I had, and I had done what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought was best for me at the time. And I stand by that. Now, if I had sold it privately, I'm sure I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have gotten quite a bit more money, but I didn't want to mess with any of that. I have no patience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that. I absolutely did not want to have somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test drive the car whether or not I'm in it, but watching them like melt my clutch. No, thank you. Uh-uh.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I did what I think was right for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The whole reason to sell to like a company like that is so that it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of your hands. It's quick. It's done. Like you're not getting the best possible price, but you're at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like not having to deal with any of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The last thing you should possibly then know is like, so how much profit are they going to make off of me?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cuz like there's there's no good that comes from that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, again, I think it's fascinating just because I was curious what they would do. And I,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I sold the BMW to a local like CarMax equivalent, it was one of those like, we'll beat CarMax
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prices, but they beat it by literally $150, I believe. Anyways, when I sold it to them,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what they listed it for, but it was, I don't know, a couple grand more than they paid me, which is what I expected, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it was a relatively unremarkable three series and it was relatively high miles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they sold it presumably for a little bit more than they paid me. It Makes perfect sense. I get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, So I went and at the tip of a friend of mine, I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see, okay, how much are they going to sell my car for? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I should tell you that I bought the car on the 30th of August
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in 2018. That is almost exactly eight years ago from when I sold it to CarMax.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I sold it on the 14th or 15th of August in 2026. At the end of August in 2018,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I paid, I'm looking at the buyer's order right now. I paid a shade less than $40,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, for this brand new 10 miles on the odometer as per the buyer's order, a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Volkswagen Golf R. I sold it to CarMax. I think I said, what was it, 26 and change? I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what it was now. I sold it for 26 and change. Other people had offered quite a bit less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than that. And I felt like I was doing pretty well. And to be honest, I still do. CarMax is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listing my car for a shade less than $39,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sorry, I lied to you a minute ago. That was the price with taxes. The actual purchase price,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my mistake, was $37,500 So before taxes, $37,500.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In 2018, brand new, CarMax has it listed for a shade less than $39,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This car appreciated from their point of view since I bought it. And I find that astonishing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm actually not upset about this because I don't think they're going to sell it for that much. But can you fathom? They're
⏹️ ▶️ Casey selling it for more than my total purchase price in 2018. I am shocked.
⏹️ ▶️ John Rare cars appreciate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess. I didn't think it was that rare,
⏹️ ▶️ John though. I mean, it's, but it didn't appreciate that much. not like they're
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey selling it for, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, 300 grand. But yeah, rare cars appreciate. Just ask all your 911 friends.
ATP Insider: Show Q&A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a couple things to announce. First of all, there is a new ATP members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey special, ATP Insider Show Q and a John, can you tell us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. Uh, One of the eternal potential topics we have for member specials is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, tell us about the history of the show or long-running gags or whatever, because a lot of people haven't listened
⏹️ ▶️ John to the whole show. Or maybe if you have, you don't remember everything. And we get a lot of people asking, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John uh explain this to me about the show. What's the deal? Why is it called accidental? You know, how did you guys meet?
⏹️ ▶️ John that type of Those type of questions. And it just so happens that we had a listener write in with a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of questions. uh And we just went through those questions because it sort of like focused us on instead of just doing
⏹️ ▶️ John like the entire history of the show and everything you ever need to know about it, we just use those questions as jumping off points with a couple
⏹️ ▶️ John of additions. And we ended up talking about the whole history of the show and, you know, how
⏹️ ▶️ John it all got started and where it went and some of the long-running gags. And we just, you know, it's a little bit of everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's a little bit navel-gazing, but some people want to know that stuff because we don't really explain it. We
⏹️ ▶️ John just do it in the show. And if you listen enough, you can pick it up from like context clues, but it's nice to sort of hear
⏹️ ▶️ John it from the source. And if you're a long time listener and you already know this stuff, I think you'll still find stuff in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John that's interesting. We retell stories that we've told before, but greatly expanded. And it was a lot of fun to do. So I think it's
⏹️ ▶️ John a good member special.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was cathartic implies that like something bad had happened, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was very cathartic for me to like re, I can't think of a better word, but anyway, reconnect with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This all sounds terrible. We're going to leave it in because here we go. But I'm making it sound like I hate the two of these guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't, obviously, but it was really nice to kind of take a mirror on the three of us and talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, you know, how did we get here? Because, you know, i'm I'm very proud of the work that the three of us do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm very appreciative that you two fellas are continuing to stick it out with me and vice versa. and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this thing, I don't know what the final runtime was, but we recorded for something like two hours. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought it was really interesting and really fun. Maybe you, the listener, will like it. Maybe you won't, but you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely check it out. And I wanted to absolutely call out Joseph Humphrey, who sent all these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 21st of October, 2025, to give you a hint as to how long it takes for us to get to things. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you to Joseph Humphrey for basically giving us an entire member special.
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, additionally, there's one more thing to announce, and I promise we're going to talk follow-up for a real long time. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Don't worry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We'll get to the follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, there's plenty there. We got to talk about St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me remind you that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And because of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are trying to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital along with all of our friends at Relay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you have any money to scrape together, even a dollar, even $5, that's great. It's not,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shouldn't even, I shouldn't say even. I should say if you have $5 or a dollar or whatever, you should go to stjude.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP. And the reason you do that is because we,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the three of us, really believe in St. Jude's mission, which is that no child should die in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dawn of their life. And they predominantly concentrate on childhood cancer, but they'll treat all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really awful illnesses. So as an example, St. Jude has helped deliver free cancer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey medicines to children in seven countries with more to come. And I bring this up because a lot of times people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the UK will understandably be like, well, we don't have this problem because we actually have socialized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey medicine and we're a civilized country. And first of all, I'm jealous. But second of all, you might still have this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. And even if you personally don't, other countries around you may. So as of April of this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey childhood cancer medicines have been delivered to seven countries, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Ecuador, Nepal, Zambia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jordan, and Moldova. This effort is a part of the global platform for access to childhood
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cancer medicines, a collaboration between St. Jude the World Health Organization and other global partners. It aims
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to reach more than 120,000 children in 50 countries in the next seven years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The second set of countries has already been announced as El Salvador, Ghana, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sri
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lanka. So this is an example that St. Jude is trying to do more than, to reach out to more than just America.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, we told the story maybe last week, maybe the week before, of one of your fellow listeners who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a child who was stricken with childhood cancer, and their child was treated with a regimen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was developed primarily at St. Jude. And they were told that, even though they were not anywhere geographically close to Memphis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you should really think about donating to St. Jude. You can do that by going to St. Jude.org slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, if you, I don't know, maybe on Saturday spent a lot of money on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a phone that perhaps you didn't need, what could you do to kind of assuage your guilt about your rampant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is such a great question because as you know, in addition to being Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, it's also rampant consumerism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco season in the Apple enthusiast world. And so if you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought a phone to replace a phone that you maybe could have gotten a bit more time out of, or maybe an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch that you could have gotten a little, maybe one more year out of, or maybe you're going to wait for the duo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know how much the duo costs and you know, you know, how much you don't need to spend on a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, do I have the solution for your guilt? What you have to do is figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Marco offset. Now, as we discussed in previous episodes, you figure out the base price of the family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of phone that you are getting and you figure out whatever your total transaction will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, including sales tax, storage upgrades, cases, AppleCare,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all in price. And that number, the difference between the base and that number,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the level one Marco offset. That is your recommended minimum donation to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you can swing it. And we figure if you can tack in all those extras when buying a phone, you probably, that's probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an amount you can swing unless you're really strapped. Now, also, if you want to go a little bit further, what else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might you be guilty about this year? How about using AI? Well, do we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the solution for you? Level two of the Marco offset is, in addition to your iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offset that we just talked about. And by the way, same thing applies to Apple Watches and even Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soon, which could be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann significant offset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you get any kind of storage or RAM upgrades. Anyway, level two is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you also add on to that whatever you spent on a paid AI plan this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month. Level three is you add on to that whatever you spent on a paid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI plan this year. So if you have a lot of guilt to assuage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will personally use our powers, I guess, assigned to us by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you of your consumer guilt for buying needless Apple products and for using AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just give those equivalent amounts to St. Jude this month. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, anything to add?
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll just remind everybody that the podcast-a-thon is happening. The Relay Podcast-a-thon
⏹️ ▶️ John is happening. It's just happening a little bit later this year instead of overlapping with iPhone announcement week.
⏹️ ▶️ John So stay tuned for that. Like we'll do these segments for the whole month of September, but I think the podcast-a-thon
⏹️ ▶️ John is about the first week of October. That's right. It's, I think, the first or second. I forget the day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the top of my head. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be there, so I should know. Casey will be there. If you want to see Casey roped into a bunch of terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John games, uh this is the show for you. It's really entertaining. It's just like you can
⏹️ ▶️ John drop in and drop out all day long. Tons of stuff happening. And that's a great time to pledge. If you can't, like, you hear
⏹️ ▶️ John us talking about it, like, yeah, yeah, get on with the show, whatever. Watch the podcastathon because at some point you'll be like, oh, I guess this
⏹️ ▶️ John is now when I should pledge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, very much so. It is Friday, October 2nd, from noon, one true time zone until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey midnight, one true time zone. And inevitably, I will do something deeply and woefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey embarrassing. And if you want to share in my shame, you should check it out and go to the Relay YouTube channel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can find it there. But again, one last time, saintjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dot org slash ATP. Thank you for bearing with us as we get through some administrivia.
iPhone-event video production
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let's start follow up. And honestly, we're probably not going to finish it, but we're going to see what we can do. And we're going to start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with friend of the show Todd Vizzieri, pointing out that there's a lot of James Bond homages, did I say that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In the iPhone event video. And Todd writes, the iPhone event video includes references to James Bond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey films, particularly the opening shot of Skyfall from 2012 when presenting former CEO Tim Cook. Bond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey walking from left to right in profile when introducing new CEO John Turnis, and James Bond, the James Bond
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gun barrel title sequence when referring or referencing, excuse me, the new variable aperture featured on the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 18 Pro. You can see this detailed in Todd's very brief blog post. He
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also has a video comparison, which we will also link in the show notes. Todd continues, back in 2018,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I documented, I, as in Todd, documented the heavy influence of Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol from 2011
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 2018 Apple event introduction as well. And we'll link that in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John I hadn't seen Skyfall in ages, but when you see the side by side, it's not just like inspired by an homage to
⏹️ ▶️ John it's shot for shot. Like you got to watch it. It's, you know, really, I mean, I guess maybe they expected it to be more
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious to viewers, but I only saw the movie once and I didn't remember it at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. All right. And then I found this absolutely fascinating, but TechZ,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey T-E-C-H-Z-H-A, pointed this out to us or pointed us to a post from Apple from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey Apple um, instagram uh not channel, GZPZ account,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh where they have some information about the event video. And they said they filmed in 20 different locations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey across 38 filming days, which I found astonishing. uh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There were two astronauts and eight Roman soldiers, and Kyan Drance was captured in the backlot used for Seinfeld
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Friends, which is all interesting. That was all from Apple. Back to tech, whatever. Uh, And I thought they only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey filmed for two or three days before the event to keep everything secret. My exploding head emoji. I agree, Tech Zaha.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also thought it was only a few days, and I had no idea it was over a month.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, anyway, the 20 locations, like Apple Park is one of them for like the whole rest of the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe it's 37 locations for the intro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know. It could be. uh, Either way, that is astonishing. And thank you to TechZaha for pointing that
New Geekbench scores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We've got some preliminary Geekbench scores for the 820 Pro, the M6, and the M5 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The 820 Pro, which is in the iPhone of iPhone's 18 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to give you a preamble.
⏹️ ▶️ John So these these pre preliminary scores is always like, oh, someone connected a device
⏹️ ▶️ John and ran Geekbench and their their score got registered. That's how we see them. Like, the devices are not in everyone's
⏹️ ▶️ John hands. Sometimes they aren't even in reviewers' hands yet. But anyway, that's how they get up here. That's why they're preliminary
⏹️ ▶️ John because there's a lot of variability when people report scores from their devices, depending on if their device was hot or cold. Was
⏹️ ▶️ John it being overclocked? Was it sitting on an ice pack? You know, like, who knows what else was going on on the device? So
⏹️ ▶️ John take that with a grain of salt. And the second thing is Geekbench has recently changed from Geekbench
⏹️ ▶️ John version six to Geekbench version seven. and their website makes it really annoying to make sure you're comparing
⏹️ ▶️ John apples to apples. So for all of these scores, I always tried to find, if I can't find a Geekbench
⏹️ ▶️ John seven score for like an old Mac, I want to compare 6 to 6 or 7 to 7. But that means
⏹️ ▶️ John that the absolute values, just ignore them because you won't know whether it's a six or a seven value.
⏹️ ▶️ John So all you're doing is like, OK, I'm comparing this thing and this one has to be a 6 because there's no
⏹️ ▶️ John seven score for it, I have to find another comparable 6. And then I can compare the two Geekbench 6 scores
⏹️ ▶️ John and say it's X percent different from each other, but ignore the absolute values. If you hear the absolute values, like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's much lower or higher than I thought. It's just because it's a six or a seven score, right? You know, Geekbench is in a difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John transition period here and it was really annoying to do this. But anyway, the percentage differences are the things that we care about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so the A20 Pro and the iPhone's 18 Pro, the CPU single core
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance is 24% better than the A19 Pro and 11%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than the previous iOS or iPadOS single-core champ, which is the M5 iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it's 260% better than John's Mac Pro, which in the defense
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Syracusa, he himself added to the show notes. I am very proud of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I always want to look that up, you know, but this is pretty impressive. Like it's 11% faster than the previous single-core champ,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the M5. So the phone chip has better single core. I mean, it makes sense because it's a newer
⏹️ ▶️ John super-core and blah, blah, blah or whatever, but still super impressive. And yes, 260% faster in single
⏹️ ▶️ John core than my Mac Pro. It hurts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that's in a phone. This is a phone chip that is performing at the same level in single-thread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco performance as a desktop chips. And like not just desktop chips three years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop chips this year, like the newest one, it is matching the newest chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just came out. That's incredible. Oh, I should
⏹️ ▶️ John have put an M6 comparison because I do have M6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later, but I don't know whether
⏹️ ▶️ John was Geekbench 6 or 7, so I can't do the direct comparison now. But yeah, it's good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, as far as I can see, it is matching the M6. So, you know, there's all these preliminary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scores on Geekbench from these chips because it seems as though all the review units are out, and so people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are testing them. And the M6 matches the single-threaded performance of the A20 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rather vice versa. The A20 Pro matches the M6, which itself, like the M6, is a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump over the M5. So that's really, it looks like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably shares the same super core.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we'll get to it in a second, but yeah, the M6 is a similar percentage faster than the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. It's incredible for that to be in a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it's astonishing. So that was all single-core. Let's talk multi-core, 25% better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the previous iPhone champ, which was last year's A19 Pro, but it's also 25%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than the M five iPad, yet it is still 20% better than John's Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as we've said in the past years, the phones have been better than my Mac in both single core and multi-core.
⏹️ ▶️ John remember I have a 12-core Xeon in here or whatever. Yeah, that continues to be the case. Although they can't
⏹️ ▶️ John compete with the M5 just because the M5 is just so much bigger chip. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco when it comes to
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-core, but still, it's only a 25% gap. So it's within shouting distance of an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Astonishing. For GPU stuff, that was all CPU. GPU, the metal benchmark,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost 40% better than the previous iPhone champ, the A19 Pro. Apple's claim, well, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was 38%. Apple's claim was a 40% increase in gaming performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that's going to be like sanity to check the number because Apple's publicity claims is like 40% increase in gaming performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, really? The metal score is 38% higher. So I'm like, all right, that checks out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then with regard to other comparisons, it's 18% less than the M5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Pro and 21% less than John's Mac Pro. Woo, baby.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm going out. this is my This is my final, because by the time we record another episode or two, I will have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, retired the Mac Pro and switched to my M5 Max Mac Studio. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I used this Intel Mac Pro for as long as I possibly could. And obviously, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John been destroyed by phone chips in every possible way, except GPU. The phone chip
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot beat my Mac's 600-watt GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or whatever the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hell is in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm still 21% faster than a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John In this one measure. But I'm just glad that I didn't have to see the day where the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John beat my Mac in single core, multi-core, and GPU. Well, do you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your studio? I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John remember. It's coming on the 22nd, supposedly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, okay. That's not bad at all. Day one. Yeah. All right. So that was all the A20 Pro, right? Now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let's move on to the M6. CPU, single-core performance is 10% better than the M5.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Multi-core performance, 35% better than the M5. These like year-over-year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improvements are astonishing. I cannot believe we're still seeing this big of a jump
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every year. Yeah. M5 Ultra, CPU is the only thing we have.
⏹️ ▶️ John missed the GPU for the M6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's what I said. I'm going to do GPU for M6 first. uh The GPU is 25%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than the M5. So the jump from M5 to M6, a 25% increase.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it's interesting that I don't know. I mean, so Geekbench, is the general benchmark disclaimer.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don't know how representative Geekbench is or anything. It's just a popular benchmark that people use. God only knows if there's some particular
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmark that suddenly fits into some cache and gives this big boost or whatever, right? We'll find out with real world uh
⏹️ ▶️ John benchmarks how these things actually do. Uh, But yeah, GPU 25%
⏹️ ▶️ John increase in a year. Multi-core, 35% increase. These are pretty big increases for the
⏹️ ▶️ John vanilla no suffix M chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, really incredible. And then finally, the M five Ultra. The CPU is roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same as the M five Max for single core, which is to be expected, I think. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multi-core, it's almost 40% better than the M3 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So again, M3 to M5 is an almost 40% increase. M5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max to M5 Ultra, a 60% increase. That is astonishing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me. So again, M3 Ultra to M5 Ultra, a 40% increase, but M5 Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to M5 Ultra, 60, almost 60% increase.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, you would, it's tricky, but it's like, hey, isn't it two M5 Maxis put together? Shouldn't it be 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John increase? Because you double everything? And that's where you get into some of the, obviously there's overhead of the, you know, the way
⏹️ ▶️ John they do the interposer and blah, blah, blah. But also, are these benchmarks like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of data dependencies are in these benchmarks? Like, there's a whole bunch of things that limit the exploitable parallelism
⏹️ ▶️ John in CPU stuff. GPUs are usually, as they say, embarrassingly parallel, and there's not a lot of data
⏹️ ▶️ John dependency slowing things down and stuff. Whereas finding multi-core CPU benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John that really let all the cores go at full speed is difficult. So it's hard to say without knowing the details of the benchmark.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, is this just a, you know, is the over, does the overhead of the two M5 Maxes stuck together continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John just cripple this chip? Or is it actually made a little bit worse by the fact that the benchmark can't actually exploit it? Again,
⏹️ ▶️ John real world benchmarks are what you care about. You're not going to be running a real world tests are what you care about. You're not going to be running benchmarks all day.
⏹️ ▶️ John You're going to be doing something with your chip. So I don't know, like someone who runs a local model, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, doing local LMs or some kind of thing that actually uses all the CPUs, like a CPU-bound rendering
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in like Blender or something that really is embarrassingly parallel. So we'll see with real-world
⏹️ ▶️ John tests, but it's so weird for this comparison because you
⏹️ ▶️ John to compare it to the M3 Ultra, which is two generations older, but it's the only thing that's close in terms of the amount of silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Really incredible work by Apple's silicon team. It just continues to be just astonishing.
C2 or Qualcomm?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk the C2, the cellular modem. Joe Rossignol at Mac Rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes: Apple says the iPhone 18 Pro has a C2 modem worldwide, while the iPhone 18 Pro Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uses the chip in every country except the U.S. Is this American exceptionalism?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don't know if this is good or bad. Anyway, according to a tipster known as It's Pidifu, iOS 27
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code reveals that the iPhone 18 Pro Max is equipped with a Qualcomm modem instead of the C2 chip in the U.S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In 2023, Qualcomm announced it would supply Apple with smartphone modems through 2026. So perhaps Apple is equipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the U.S. version of the iPhone 18 Pro Max with a Qualcomm modem in order to honor this agreement in a minimum
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe they just couldn't manufacture as many C2s. I've seen the theory in a bunch of places
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple has to ship Qualcomm chips because they had a contract or whatever. I don't know if that's how contracts work, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I'll put it this way. I'm glad I'm not getting the Pro Max because I want the C2 chip because it presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John uses less power like all of Apple's modem chips do. And everyone who's tried the C1
⏹️ ▶️ John and the C1X have said it's fine. It's good. So I'm hoping that when I get my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John 18 Pro with the C2 that I will be happy with the C2 chip and the battery life that it gives
Under-screen solar panels?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Flanker writes, So now there's a fancy heat dissipating plate behind the screen in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 18 Pro. How long before this turns into a solar panel to constantly recharge the phone? I don't know if that's feasible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but man, that sounds really slick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's not. So the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with solar charging of small portable devices is that you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't have a lot of surface area to have a meaningful charge added to modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices in most real-world conditions. There was an episode of John Chidji's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast, Pragmatic, back in 2014, 12 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Watch This Time in Space, episode 38 of Pragmatic. We'll link to it in the show notes, where he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes over like, it was shortly after the Apple Watch had come out, and he goes over the question like could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch basically be a solar panel like on its face the same way there are other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like solar mechanical or solar quartz watches that are able to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like the Citizen EcoDrive series and Seiko has some too. Like they're able to keep themselves charged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through just the face of the watch having a solar panel kind of under it. But the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is those watches use very, very little power to drive their mechanisms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas if you compare to a modern, you know, full color screened device, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery is in it, like you're talking about very different amounts of power. So I did some quick research before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show to figure out like, and by that, I mean, I asked AI, but to figure out like roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are we talking about in terms of like, if the entire face of the iPhone 17 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a solar panel, how much energy could it collect and how much would that charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its battery in, you know, reasonable conditions? And the answer is basically like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few percent per hour, really, like at most. And that's if you are not using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone at all and it's just sitting like, you know, on a table flat, like with collecting sun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it's obviously that varies based on where you are and time of day and sun angle and weather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff like that. But you're talking about a few percent per hour at most, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of the time. So it's not really enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a difference. And that's also ignoring things like, you know, would it be the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back of the phone? Like, can it then, you know, would you have to make room for the camera plateau? If it's the front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the phone, it has to obviously go under the screen, which would significantly reduce the amount of light. Like, there's just all these sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of practical problems. But the fundamental problem is that it's just not a big enough surface to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meaningful difference most of the time in most conditions for the actual amount of power that modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices use, which is a decent amount of power.
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Variable-aperture camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let's talk cameras, uh, specifically the aperture blades on the iPhones, 18
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro, uh, MKBHD says: apparently, third-party apps will be able to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infinite aperture values, Uh, not just the four preset aperture values that Apple exposes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the camera app. That is news to me. I have not watched his review yet, so that's exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Petapixel said the same thing. I think Apple has told everybody that essentially, all the reviewers, that
⏹️ ▶️ John even though we expose for aperture aperture, uh, sizes, uh, it's adjustable. So
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party apps can pick whichever sizes they want. And apparently, even during video, you can smoothly change from one
⏹️ ▶️ John aperture to another without any stepping in between. So I'm assuming they're getting this info for Apple now that I've
⏹️ ▶️ John seen it in two review videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I recommend the MKBHD review because he actually goes and shows the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in aperture values and how it affects the photos, which I thought was very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good to see. I've also seen in Petapixel's review, they noted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you actually open it up to the widest open aperture, the new F1.48, which lets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in more light, you do give a little bit in sharpness. And not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the focal plane being shallower, but in the actual sharpness of the lens, that it is less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sharp, especially outside of the center of the frame.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's true. That's true of all cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it's true. It's very, like any kind of camera or lens review, you're going to see them measure that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better the lens, the sharper the corners, but there's still always a trade-off, and it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never quite the same across the whole frame.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when you make the aperture smaller, the corners sharpen up more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. But you can tell, and based on some other reviews so far, it seems like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software is preferring the f1.8 aperture much of the time, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it really needs that extra light, like in low light scenes. And they even mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the video, they said that they had optimized the f1.8 aperture for most use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it seems like in most of the time, you're not going to get the benefit of that wider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open aperture unless you manually set it, but you might not want to. But in low light, it will be very nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although my one complaint about the MKVHD video is when he was trying to just demonstrate aperture on his bazillion dollar
⏹️ ▶️ John like red video camera that he's being recorded on. He just adjusted the aperture without like changing
⏹️ ▶️ John like the, you know, the shutter speed effectively or whatever like the equivalent is on a video camera. So it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John when he made the aperture bigger, everything got really bright. And we made the aperture smaller, everything got really dark. And it's like, well, that's not how you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John use those things. Other things adjust as well. I wish he had shown the depth
⏹️ ▶️ John of field changing because probably in the giant lens and sensor he has, he could have demonstrated that inside a little room.
⏹️ ▶️ John But whatever, it's not. He's not doing a photography tutorial. But I think it made people seem like, oh, that aperture
⏹️ ▶️ John thing just makes your pictures too bright or too dark. It's like, well, no, that's anyway. It's fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, to get an idea of what these apertures are, if you're used to other cameras, I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the conversion, and the widest open aperture, F1.48 on the iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is equivalent to F5.2 on a full frame sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the narrowest one, F4, on the iPhone, is equivalent to F14. So it's F5.2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to F14 equivalent. So this is not terrible, but it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly like if if you if you are thinking it's going to be anything like you know, a full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame 50, you know, Nifty 50 Prime lens that you got, like it's it's not. It's not going to be near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. It is nice relative to iPhone lenses, but you're still in iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John That's better than I thought. F5 is honestly better than I thought the widest open thing would be. so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Orlando writes, a note about the benefits of the new adjustable aperture in the iPhone 18 Pro. Physically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stopping down the aperture in bright environments with mixed artificial lighting helps avoid fast shutter speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that caused banding or flickering in those sources of those sources, especially in video.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Cause I mean, like all iPhone cameras ever, it has a quote unquote electronic shutter
⏹️ ▶️ John and that there's not something mechanical moving in front of the sensor. It is all just reading out the sensor in various strips.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you have lighting that flickers real fast, like when you read one row, the light could be, the LED light
⏹️ ▶️ John could be off and you read the next row, the light could be on or a little bit of overlapping. So you get this weird striping in your pictures.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you read out more slowly, then the LED lights will flicker 17 times during each row. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so it'll all even out. And that's what they're talking about. Stopping down means making the hole that the light gets in smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John That means changing the aperture to be a stop. Stopping down means changing the aperture to be a higher value.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know it's confusing terminology. But anyway, there's another possible benefit of you know, using manual control. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you take a picture and you get those weird bands, you don't know where they're coming from, uh, increase your aperture value, which
⏹️ ▶️ John will make the hole smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chris Marquatt writes, I think a big reason why the aperture blades are straight and not round is to make good-looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starbursts from point light sources. To amateur photographers, this Shouts Pro, and these starbursts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are easiest to create with straight aperture blades.
⏹️ ▶️ John He included a picture from one of Apple's samples that they showed in the keynote, which sure enough, someone has an earring and
⏹️ ▶️ John there's a specular highlight in it, and you get little starburst lines on the specular highlight.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PyGersa, it's SLR Lounge writes, as light passes into your camera through a small opening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey i.e. a small aperture at a low focal length, it bends around the edges of the blades and creates the star look.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The number of rays from each starburst is related to the number of aperture blades in your lens.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason I looked up all this stuff is because I had thought and
⏹️ ▶️ John was uh, was confirmed as I looked up the stuff that there is still some debate about the thing that Marco said last time, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like straight aperture blades versus rounded and how many blades and how much and how much that specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John affects starbursts. Not like the, the, the bokeh bubbles, which I think is much easier to just show.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the starbursts, like, okay, but like the number of blades being the number of rays, sure, but if the blades
⏹️ ▶️ John are curved versus straight, how much difference does that make? So uh, that's, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled the SLR lounge one of just saying, here's someone straight up saying the thing that Orlando or another Chris was
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, which is like, uh, yeah, a number of blades, uh, uh, straight
⏹️ ▶️ John edges make more starbursty things than rounded edges.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then uh, we have Effortless Easy in Reddit's R Photography, uh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who made a quick comparison image between two aperture types and the effect on starburst nine straight blades versus seven rounded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blades. Uh, There is a link in the show notes where you can check out the image of like a uh, cruise ship, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. And there's a very bright light on the front of the cruise ship, and you can see the straight versus rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John the rounded one still has a starburst, but it's a little bit different starburst. I didn't count the little rays around it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah. The final thing we'll link here is a thread from the DP Reviews forum where it's just a bunch of foreign people debating
⏹️ ▶️ John this topic. Does it matter they're straight? Does it matter that are rounded? Does it matter how many there are? It's again, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John related to starbursts, which is a thing that some people are kind of obsessed about. And most like lens reviews and camera reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like do a thing on starbursts. i've never found myself being particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in them. I wish they could be eliminated entirely. But if you're going for something artsy, uh it's good to know what
⏹️ ▶️ John the starburst performance characteristics are. And if you want starburst starburst with your iPhone camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess make that hole a little smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, in both of these cases, it appears as though the number of rays from the starburst is just twice the number of aperture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blades, we might have something to do with it. um But also, like, yeah, A, I would consider these both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flaws. But I understand, like, you know, sometimes you can sometimes you can use flaws for artistic effect. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco B, I think the rounded one unquestionably looks better. If you're going to have one i like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rounded one looks like more of like the dreamy look that I think most people would be going
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, those are big, like, real cameras. Like, look at the Apple one. I think apple the Apple one is a great use of Starburst.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're extremely thin and extremely sharp because, again, the actual like equivalent aperture of the
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny iPhone thing is such that they're going to look a lot more like the nine straight blades than the
⏹️ ▶️ John seven rounded ones or whatever. But I think it is artful in this picture. A little sparkle on the person's earring.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that looks nice. Whereas the cruise ship ones look terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. The other thing I pointed out is that you know, if you are using this to capture like point light sources, there's a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance you're capturing this in low light, because that's when you would most often see point light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sources is in low light. And if you're stepping down the iPhone lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the equivalent of F14 in low light, you're going to have some serious noise
⏹️ ▶️ John to hold it real still.
Under-screen Face ID illuminator
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Uh, Also, from MKBHD's uh, video review, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we'll put a timestamp link in the show notes, but there's some interesting comparisons between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the section of the screen that has Face ID behind it and the section that does not. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn't watch this yet. I apologize. I didn't have a chance. But, John, can you tell me about what's going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, last episode, I talked about how I could see the little spot on the iPhone Duo where there was the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera thing behind the screen because like they, they, uh, omit some pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in front of it so the camera can actually see. And of course, the iPhone 18 Pro and Max do the same thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not with the camera, but with the face ID IR sprayer. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it's a little bit less noticeable. And you can kind of see why in these pictures, they were just directly from the review. We
⏹️ ▶️ John got like a microscope or something, especially if you look at the like the bottom picture in our notes here. Again, we'll have a timestamp link so
⏹️ ▶️ John you can look at it, but the super zoomed in one, you can see the pattern of subpixels on the phone and their weird
⏹️ ▶️ John pentile pattern of the R, the G, and the B and these little diamond shapes. And then when you get over into
⏹️ ▶️ John the region where the FaceTime IR sprayer is up in the corner of the phone, you can see they
⏹️ ▶️ John just omit like these zigzagging strips where there's no subpixels. There's nothing there. That's where the
⏹️ ▶️ John IR is coming out of. It's in between all these things. If you look the area where the IR camera is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John there's no place for the IR rays to come out. But where they are, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John like it's like a little zigzag pattern. And the zoomed out one, i'm like, okay, now that I know that's there and I look, can
⏹️ ▶️ John you see it like around the 12 on this clock thing? Oh, yeah, there's a little circle that's a little bit darker. I would assume
⏹️ ▶️ John that they would drive the pixels a little bit harder within that circle, but maybe they're not. Like maybe that's too
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to do. Like in other words, if you have fewer sub-pixels, drive them a little bit brighter. So the overall
⏹️ ▶️ John appearance is that there's not a dim circle. But once I get my phone, I'll definitely be looking for this. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I think it is less noticeable than the camera in the duo because the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera in the duo is a visible light camera. And I think that just needs more holes in the pixels for
⏹️ ▶️ John the light to go in than an IR one needs for the IR to go out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, makes sense.
More on iPhone Duo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk iPhone duo. I had an epiphany
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just before I sat down to record. I was trying to do something on my phone with iPhone mirroring, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was trying to monitor something that was going on. And it occurred to me: what is going to happen for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone mirroring with the duo? Like, will you be able to switch between the exterior and interior screens?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Will you only get one or the other? I don't think we can solve this problem right now, but I'm just very curious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know, how is that going to work?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they'd let you switch between them. What they should really do is make it a 3D model that you can like open and close. I
⏹️ ▶️ John bet it'll just be like a switch where you you know you hit the switch and it does a little opening animation and you see the inner screen
⏹️ ▶️ John or you have it closed. But we'll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you excited to get iPhone mirroring when you finally have an Apple Silicon Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I have iPhone mirroring now, don't I?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don't think you
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I never use it, but I'm pretty sure I have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, do you, Casey, do you use it a lot? I wouldn't say a lot. I use it probably a few times a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Generally speaking, my phone is on my person. So if I'm using it on my computer, I could grab my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In this case, I was trying to monitor something that has an app, but doesn't have like a website or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I was going to leave it up on one of my screens to just kind of glance at from time to time. As it turns out, something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going on where it kept timing out. And so I'm not sure what was going on there. But I use it from time to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. I definitely would miss it if it was gone, but it wouldn't like shatter my world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that. I'm guessing you barely use it, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So the problem is I will occasionally like, you know, get a notification forward to my Mac and I'll click it and it'll try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open iPhone mirroring. And the problem is I use iPhone mirroring infrequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough that every time it has to authenticate itself again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, don't don't get John started on that sort of issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I'm just like, ah, forget it. Like every time, it's like, okay, I have to go unlock the phone or type in. It's like, forget it. I'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just take my phone out of my pocket and do this. So it's one of those areas where Apple's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over security around this feature makes it so that I just never use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I hear you. Anyways, moving on, there is no action button on the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Duo, and we couldn't remember if we actually called that out as an item on the last episode, but we're saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it now. That bums me out. My action button is the flashlight, which I'm pretty darn sure I stole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that idea from Marco, which I might have even made fun of you for when I initially heard it. And let me tell you, once I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, it's a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, uh, So I'm sad about that. Now, I am glad that it does continue to have the camera control, less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I almost never use camera control for the like slidey action, but I love using it not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only to launch the camera app, but also sometimes to actually snap a photo. So I'm glad that it still has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera control, but I am bummed about no action button.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's so weird Cause the action button is so small. I know room is tight on the duo and they don't have a lot of room for stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and the sides are shorter. Like I understand why it's like, let's let's economize on buttons, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I almost kind of think that like they could just made the camera control smaller and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John use the room,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the room that they say, it because
⏹️ ▶️ John the action button is so tiny. I mean, maybe, is it bigger on the 17? On my 16, the action button
⏹️ ▶️ John is the tiniest button ever. I'm like, find a place for that, but we'll see if the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that's the problem. It's like on on what edge? Like, if it's on the top edge, it's competing with volume, which I guess it
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, like, put it somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, like, there's that's the problem with the folding phones. is like, well, you have to pick an edge. And whatever edge you pick is going to be inconvenient
⏹️ ▶️ John for somebody in some situation, like the volume buttons being on the top and bottom, which I think we also didn't mention. You
⏹️ ▶️ John just have to pick an edge. And, you know, people will make, that that's the, that's the beauty of the action button is like, well, what if there's some
⏹️ ▶️ John function that there's a button for? But the way I use the phone, it's not convenient for me to get to that button. The
⏹️ ▶️ John action button would be like, okay, well, I'll just, I'll just configure the action button to do that thing, even though there's already
⏹️ ▶️ John a button that does that. Like having the action button be the camera shutter, because the way you hold your duo, it's more
⏹️ ▶️ John convenient for you to hit that than the camera button. So that's why I think it would have been useful. Just kind of like a another
⏹️ ▶️ John option for people uh because we don't, I don't think even Apple knows like how are people
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to hold this and use it and what's going to be convenient and not like they made their best guess where they put the buttons now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John once this thing gets out into the wider world, we'll see. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we were trying to theorize what was going to happen with keyboards on the duo, particularly when you're on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal screen. I can never keep their official terminology straight. I apologize. But anyway, the duo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does indeed have a split keyboard when you have it open. So you are using the internal screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, do you remember where the screenshot came from?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wish I would have been able to find a source for it. I just I screenshotted it. It was probably from a video, but I think this is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, an official Apple video, but there's a bunch of things in official Apple Media that show, yes, it does indeed
⏹️ ▶️ John have an iPad style split keyboard, although not the iPad style. iPad used to actually have like a like a gap between
⏹️ ▶️ John the split where you could see the screen in some iterations. But this is a straight across the bottom of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the it's split because like half of the keys are close to your left thumb and half of the keys are close to
⏹️ ▶️ John your right thumb. And then there's just a big alley around the crease where there's nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is one of the parts I'm most curious about. Like Having the duo in use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how weird is it that the keyboard can basically be three different sizes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, Like I think just gut feeling wise, I would think that would really bother me. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is like I've never used the touch keyboard very much on iPads for this reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like because it's always like a different size than my phone, like not what I'm used to. So this though, I mean, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart way to do it in that they can probably keep the keys like the same sizes and distances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apart in both orientations of the inner screen. But then it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be different on the outer screen. So I don't
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it's like typing on an iPad. It's weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like, and I suspect, I mean, because I mean, I guess this is part of what we'll see like when we have these devices and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually have time to use them. But like, are you going to want to type much on the outer screen given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it's so short? And you're probably not going to have a lot of space above the keyboard to see what you're typing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into? I don't know. It all remains to be seen how this device will actually be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used by everybody. And I think everyone's going to be forced to kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like relearn how to physically use a phone uh in a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different ways while getting used to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It's so funny to me because i I'm going to get one of these. We talked about that before. um I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey waffle a lot between being sad about the camera and you know the now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the action button. But when I get past that, when I allow myself to actually be enthusiastic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am really excited to try this. And I am really excited for something that is genuinely new in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the world of iPhones. Yes, Android people, we hear you, we know. But in the world of iPhones, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely excited to try something new. And even if this isn't for me, which who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knows, but even if this isn't for me, I think it's going to be super neat to have something just wildly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different to play with for a while. And I'm getting ever more excited for it as time goes on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, remind me of this when I try to take a zoomed in shot of my children and can't, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am, I am genuinely getting really, really excited for this. And I think it's going to be a really, really interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. There's a lot of gotchas. There's a lot of compromises, as we talked about. There's a lot of yeah, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I, I feel like to offset some of my fetching and complaining from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode, I genuinely am really excited for this. I don't know, Marco, you're in for one. You had said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are you feeling the same? Are you just dreading it? I know from the developer point of view, it sucks. We're going to put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that aside for now. But from a user point of view, I'm getting really, really amped for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, we we got, we got a piece of feedback sometime that was basically like, why are we so negative on the duo? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, were we that negative on the duo? But I, But I think like I really am speaking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from two different parts of my, uh, but I guess I don't know. Um, Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the developer side, I'm really irked at how Apple is handling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. But from the user side, I am really excited about this new device. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it's going to have a bit of a slow start on the software side.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John As I said last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, for everybody, for Apple software and for our software, it's going to be a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of safe area inset bugs and betas and non-updated apps. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a physical device perspective, imagine what this opens up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No pun intended. Nice. There is so, like, first of all, even just the basics of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like taking a selfie, you can now use the best camera on your phone to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take a selfie because you can see yourself on the outer screen. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there's so many assumptions or, as I was saying earlier, patterns about using phones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this changes or at least gives you the opportunity to change. Not to mention, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, as you, you know, as you open it up, you have a way bigger screen than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any other phone has ever, or than any other iPhone has ever offered. I know Android people are like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on fire. They didn't invent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Set that aside. Any other iPhone has ever offered. So that opens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up lots of potential for software, for different use cases. I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually very excited about the Apple Pencil support.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, first of all, just from an app development perspective, I want to make my note-taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app for it at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, breaking news. You didn't tell us this. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I've said recently, you did? Where was I when that happened? I do not remember you saying that. I'm sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, nothing was stopping you from making that app for the iPad, except for your hatred of the iPad. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that's what was stopping
⏹️ ▶️ John me. because you'll be on your couch and people who like iPads are like, oh, when I sit on my couch
⏹️ ▶️ John and read through my news for the day, I like to do it on my iPad. And you're like, iPad, my iPad, it's in the drawer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't care. But you'll have your phone. And maybe when you're there, you're like, you know, I'm going to read a long article.
⏹️ ▶️ John And actually, it's nicer to read this long article if I open up my phone into you know, the open mode
⏹️ ▶️ John and put it in portrait orientation. And now I can make the text bigger and I can read more at once. So maybe you'll
⏹️ ▶️ John end up as like an accidental iPad mini user after doing this, but we'll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, but you know, a lot of people, like I've heard a lot of people say that they, that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, why don't you just get an iPhone Pro and an iPad mini? And, you know, it's, it's like the similar price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to just get both of those things. And it's because I don't want two different devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole appeal of this is that it's one device that is always with you in your pocket. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I do think, obviously there's downsides. You know, there's the camera systems are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse in a lot of ways. There's, you know, I'm sure the speakers are going to be worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Thicker and heavier.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it's obviously significantly thicker and heavier, which I will not like at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the summertime. And, you know, in short, it's going to be ridiculous bouncing around in my pocket. But there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot opened up by this. Like, there are so many tasks, you know, because I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the age of 35, I don't, there are some tasks that I'm just like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'll just wait till I get to my computer for this because the phone screen is too small to do this comfortably. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, you know, I want to open up multiple tabs and go back and forth or have bounce between different things. And like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of that won't change. You know, if I'm researching a major purchase, I'm still probably going to be doing that like mostly on a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer. But there are a lot of tasks that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attempt to do on my phone that would just be a lot easier if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something else with a bigger screen. And the Duo will be able to bridge that gap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not for all tasks, but for many tasks. Even something simple as like, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are some times where I want to bring a laptop somewhere because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if I'm going to be, if I'm going somewhere like overnight, but I don't know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my server going to explode in the middle of the night? And I'm going to have to like SSH into something and fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These days, I just bring a Mac. I bring my travel laptop because, oh, well, no big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there are some situations where I could just bring this and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be okay, especially if I get one of those dumb little pocket keyboard things that like folds up. you know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, There's all sorts of of ways to make this work as like a little mini workstation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And people have been doing this with iPads for years, but I just don't like the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to like the iPad, but I don't. But there are parts of the iPad I like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wish I liked the rest of the iPad enough to always have one with me, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don't. And one of those parts is the Apple Pencil. I love using the Apple Pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though I'm not an artist at all, and I hardly ever handwrite any notes. But when I do, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like having that. I like, you know, earlier today, I like, I was having a conversation and I wanted to quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doodle some graphs, like just some basic like, you know, shapes of like, okay, you know, a linear curve, an exponential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curve. And I grabbed my remarkable tablet, powered it on, and, you know, took it out. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was great for that purpose. But like, if I had this, I could just take that out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I could even, I mean, it's big enough, I could just doodle it with my finger even. Like, that's step one is like, you don't even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need the Apple Pencil for for like Sharpie on a post-it note type granularity. You know, you could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with your finger. But with, you know, with this size screen, like if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Apple Pencil on this size screen, that's about the, that's almost as big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a lot of like pocket notebooks that people use. Or it's actually bigger. It's bigger than a Moleskine. It's bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the field notes. So that becomes like a potentially interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco digital notebook. So there are things like that that I'm interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and that I think could be good markets to get into or at least good tools for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to use myself. So there's all sorts of stuff like that. Part of what is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco daunting from a developer point of view is that it's not just a bigger iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's a smaller iPhone that becomes a much bigger iPhone that can also be a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sort of clamshell mode or a tent and all these different other shapes that it can be in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of those both open up possibilities as a user and a developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also create burdens as a developer to very, very quickly make your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app not suck in all these different positions and stuff that it might end up in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we have you know, no time to do it and literally still no tools to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is totally, I think, a consistent view to say both this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks as developers right now. And also, as users, this is very exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can't wait to get my hands on one. And I'm trying my hardest to do whatever it takes to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one on day one as soon as we can. But between now and then, it's going to be absolute hell as
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the two things are related. The reason it sucks as a developer is also the exact same reason why it's exciting as a user,
⏹️ ▶️ John because in theory, you're going to get to try all sorts of new things in apps. Unfortunately, you're a developer apps and you have to make
⏹️ ▶️ John all those new things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I see a lot of commentary going around with people basically trying to rationalize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why this sucks. And that's a very healthy human response because the response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, first of all, it's really expensive. So you don't you don't you're trying to just disregard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it so that you don't have to consider buying it because it's really expensive. Or you don't have to feel bad that you can't or won't
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy it because it's expensive. So their typical response, disregard it. Find some way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, ah, it's not. I don't, that's that thing sucks. Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there will be parts of it that suck because it's the first version. Like, I'm sure there's always going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco visible crease lines after a relatively short time. I'm sure there's going to, you know, you're going to be able to notice some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those under screen camera, you know, dim areas and stuff like that. It is going to be physically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odd in certain ways. It is going to suck for left-handers, at least for a little while. I'm sure there's eventually going to be software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco toggles, but like there will, there will be parts of it that do suck, but there's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also a lot of promise here. And it doesn't all suck. And at some point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the road, they'll make one with better cameras. And they'll make one that adds an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action button somewhere for John. And at some point down the road, many of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things will be improved in future versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But this first version, there's a lot of reasons for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to love this thing, I bet. And the reactions from people who have tried folding phones of this size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very, very good. And so I think it's going to be a hit. It's just going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a hit that's going to be pretty small relative to the rest of the iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, people are saying it's like a like a 2% global industry for foldables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far or global market share for foldables. And so if this if this ends up being 2% of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all iPhones sold, first of all, I think it'll probably be more than that. But I don't think it's gonna be a ton more than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. And that's, that would still be a lot of units. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to say it sucks, you'll still find ways that you can say that because it's going to be a low percentage of market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share. But I think every single person who buys this thing is going to have a very, very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chance of loving it because that's what typically happens in foldables. Like people who get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco foldables tend to love them. And I think this is way better than the Android
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones in almost every way. So I think it's going to be a big hit. I think they're going to be backordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for months and it's going to be very difficult to get. And that's because it's going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm very, very curious and excited to see how this lands from a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a market share perspective, because I think it is likely it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be one of two extremes. It will either be a giant hit, like you said, or it'll be an iPhone Air. We'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. There is no way that this ends up selling as little as the iPhone Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm telling you, it's not even going to, it's going to blow the iPhone Air out of the water.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you're right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, that's like blowing like, you know, a little toy bathtub tugboat out of the water. Like it's, It's a pretty small target.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the iPhone Air, as I mentioned, I don't want to be too cruel to it, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone Air has very little reason for almost anyone to choose it over the other iPhones. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone Duo has substantial reasons for people to choose it. So I I think it's going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we'll see. But I just wanted to say, because irrespective of feedback, I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I was so shell-shocked by the developer story, which as of today is still not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting better. There's a new version of Xcode, not including the simulator for the iPhone Duo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was amazing. So the the news drops today. Xcode 26.2 beta release. Like, wait, what?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We were waiting for 26.1. What happened? And then we go and look, and at least Apple had the courtesy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the download page to have a big gray box that basically says this is not the one you're looking for if you're looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for duo development. It's like, okay. So we have 26.0.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have 26.2 beta. 26.1 beta still to come sometime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later this month. Well, 27, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Sorry, 27. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Still to come. So we still don't even have a simulator to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try this with, let alone be able to adjust our apps to actually try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of this stuff. So yeah, the developer story for this is incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fumbled. Like it's going to be a mess. And I'm still substantially irked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a result of what they're… Because like, honestly, I think I think if they're never going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, but I think a fair thing for Apple to do would be to not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow App Store reviews from the iPhone Duo for the first three months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Years ago, they changed the policy for betas. They used to allow reviews from betas. they And years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they realized like what was happening was people would install the developer beta one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their phone on day one. Some app would not work on beta one because the developer hadn't had access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the beta until that day. And the person would go one star in the App Store. So Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realized, OK, this is unfair to developers. So you can no longer leave App Store reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or ratings on beta versions of iOS. Well, I think for a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason, again, they're never going to do this, but I think for a similar reason, they shouldn't allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to review apps on the iPhone Duo when developers have had almost no time to adopt to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it either. And again, they're not going to do this. But it would be great if they just disallowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those reviews for a few months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. We'll see. I'm sure it won't happen.
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Ternus/Joz interview
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk some other videos. Tom's Guide's Mark Spoonhour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and TechRadar's Lance Ulinoff interviewed Turnis and Jaws in two parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like one of them was on the Tom's Guide YouTube, one of them was on TechRadar's YouTube. And Thomas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ricker at The Verge quoted Jaws from that interview. We'll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to both parts in the show notes. I believe this is from part one. Jaws said, people knew through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaks that we were working on a foldable, said Jaws. Unfortunately, they got the aspect ratio and a lot of coincidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instances of people finding that an interesting aspect ratio. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sorry, reading from Thomas Ricker, by people, Jaws means Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi, who all announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey foldables with similar aspect ratios ahead of Apple. What did remain a secret is the folding nano
⏹️ ▶️ Casey textured display unique to the iPhone Duo. Now quoting Jaws again, what I'm super proud of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we kept it secret. We put the extra security on it. We didn't talk about it to anybody. We had a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny code name, which I won't repeat, which had nothing to do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, Mark Gurman, get on that. We got to know what this code
⏹️ ▶️ John name was. Right? Poor Jaws. He's out there being like, look, every
⏹️ ▶️ John millimeter of this phone hardware leaked. But there's one piece of the hardware that
⏹️ ▶️ John we kept secret. And we're so proud that we kept the matte coating on the screen secret.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, okay. By all accounts, it's a great coding. Like, people who have
⏹️ ▶️ John your victory where you can get them. But like, you know, it's so thoroughly leaked that
⏹️ ▶️ John as as the as Thomas noted, the competitors had enough time to make their own copycat phones and release
⏹️ ▶️ John them before Apple's phone was out. and they sure What they should be proud of, and they did talk about in the interview, was like, we kept the software secret.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they did do that. um Obviously, the supply chain for software is considerably
⏹️ ▶️ John narrower than the supply chain required to make a hardware product like the iPhone Do, which is why all these things leak
⏹️ ▶️ John like crazy. But I just like seeing Jaws out there saying, yeah, we put extra secrecy on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It's like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, if you had put that extra secrecy on the phone hardware, do you think that would have helped? The answer is no.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's no stopping it. Like, unless you're going to make all the phones yourself at Apple Park, every
⏹️ ▶️ John phone you make is going to leak down to the millimeter now and forever. Sorry, Jaws.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say broadly, I really enjoyed this interview for two reasons. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I have the same shirt as Jaws. You would. I was proud of myself for spotting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Number two, and it's a great shirt. Number two, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great seeing John Ternus in this interview. Like now, now being CEO
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple, you have a CEO doing interviews about the products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where he shows personality and opinions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and deep knowledge of the details of the product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are things we never got from Tim Cook. And yes, everyone's being very kind to Tim. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he's not the kind of leader. And that's true. He wasn't. He was what we needed at the time and blah, blah, blah. Yes, that's true. It's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great and refreshing to have somebody now in that position who is showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco personality and points of view and explaining product decisions in ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Tim Cook never did and probably never could. Because again, that wasn't the kind of person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was. It's great. It's refreshing. And, you know, we're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only seeing the very, very first couple of moments of Ternus's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tenure here. And again, we don't know how he's going to feel on issues that might be more controversial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to us. But at least this part really shows this is a product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person. He knows about the products. He has that very deep knowledge. In a similar way, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I've always been very impressed— in interviews by, of Craig Federighi because Federighi also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, despite being like a high level executive, Federighi knows very deep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the software and a lot of the like the, the algorithms and the decision making and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the, like he, he knows deep stuff, because Federighi is a nerd first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like He's an engineer who happened to rise into rise through the ranks. And John Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also like, he is that engineering mind. He knows the hardware details,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the little thing he said about like the, the moving parts about the iPhone um, aperture blades. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can tell he knows deeply what's going on in these products. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a company that the products are everything, um, except for the services,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the products are the main thing, Uh, that's really great. And I'm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so happy to see this. And I'm not that surprised because we've seen Ternus do interviews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually even with Jaws to these same people like last year. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like we've never seen him before, but to know that this is the CEO of Apple now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think he's also, he's gaining confidence and he's kind of letting loose a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. And you're able to see like more of his personality. And so far, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, I don't have any particular complaints
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Tim Cook, particularly from a personality. Well, let me try that again. What I'm saying, Tim was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always going to be guarded. I feel like that's just who Tim is based on no facts, but that's just the vibe I get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Tim, I think, has taken his media training very seriously. As we spoke about last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, the way he delivered his one or two lines in the intro keynote, I thought were more personality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we got out of Tim than we did in the 15 years prior. um, There's been a couple of flashes of exception.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think one of you cited the, uh, you know, get out of the stock, or I forget exactly what he said. Um, But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, you know, if if you don't believe in environmental stuff, this stock isn't for you or something like that. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I feel like Turnis is way more a human than Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is. And that is so refreshing and exciting. And, And I am really here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, you know, who is this person? I feel like Tim, as much as we snark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and joke about our idiot president who called him Tim Apple, I kind of get it because he kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of is Tim Apple, you know? Like there's so little Tim outside of his, you know, relationship
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Apple. And I feel like we're already getting a sense that Turnus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while clearly media trained, is willing to, by comparison anyway, wear his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heart on his sleeve and be more of a human being than Tim ever was. And I'm really here for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like in this interview, Turnis was very similar to how he was when he wasn't CEO. So in other
⏹️ ▶️ John having two days into the job or whatever, being CEO has not changed him because he totally did the interview,
⏹️ ▶️ John not as I am the Apple CEO, but just as the same John Ternus you've seen do these interviews for years, And which means
⏹️ ▶️ John he was relaxed and he was casual and you did see his personality because you always saw that from him. So it's
⏹️ ▶️ John nice to see, first of all, that he didn't like, oh, now that I'm the CEO, I have to act differently. He didn't feel that at all. He didn't
⏹️ ▶️ John act differently. But I will say, speaking of Federighi, one of the things I will miss from, I know
⏹️ ▶️ John this was never really in the cards, but like, let's say Federigi had become CEO. Federighi
⏹️ ▶️ John remains the only senior executive from Apple, maybe with the
⏹️ ▶️ John possible exception of Schiller occasionally, who's kind of on his way out the door, and sometimes Jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but but Federighi the most, he does the thing that back in the day, only Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs would do, in that Steve Jobs would offer up information to
⏹️ ▶️ John the press because he felt like it, inside information that he would have like fired other employees for
⏹️ ▶️ John he felt like talking about it, he would because he's Steve Jobs. He's like, who's going to tell him no? And so
⏹️ ▶️ John he did it all the time. You know, it'd be some interview and Jobs would go off on some tangent and he would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, when we did X, we did Y and Z and Q. And like, if anybody else had said that, instant firing. But Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John could say, because what the hell? Federighi does that. When he tells stories about software, he always
⏹️ ▶️ John reveals infos that has never been revealed anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John it's mostly just of interest to nerds or whatever. But like, he's not pre-clearing all that with people.
⏹️ ▶️ John He just, he's just like, yeah, when we did this, we thought of this and we did that and we tried this. And it's like, oh, that's not that's
⏹️ ▶️ John not the media playbook. Like, Craig, don't we don't tell them anything about our process
⏹️ ▶️ John or what we did or whatever. He's always doing that. And he gets away with it because it's always like details that only nerds care
⏹️ ▶️ John about, right? Turnus is not like that. Turnus in all his past interviews and presentations
⏹️ ▶️ John usually does not accidentally or intentionally tell you some detail
⏹️ ▶️ John about their process. I feel like everything Turnus ever says about a product is
⏹️ ▶️ John something that has already been cleared as a talking point. And that is not going to change when
⏹️ ▶️ John he's CEO. If anything, you would think it
⏹️ ▶️ John go in the other direction. but It seems to be just the same. But that is one of the things I really enjoy about Federighi is that he,
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever reason, he feels like he has the authority to reveal you
⏹️ ▶️ John know minor internal details of their process of creating software because he's the head of software
⏹️ ▶️ John guy. And I guess no one ever yells at him. So he's like, I'll just keep doing that. So I do enjoy that about him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. All right.
More Duo stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along, let's talk. iPhone side dock. Friend of the show, Stephen Robles,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey points out that you know people are saying that this is the first time the iPhone dock is on the right, but they're forgetting the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 6 Plus, which would, in landscape, put the dock on the right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it kept the dock where it was, but it would rotate all the all the icons.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco totally forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ John about this because I obviously never had one of these big phones. this was I guess this was their notion of how to do big phones
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iPhone 6 Plus. What does it do now on the Maxes when you rotate it? it just It just doesn't rotate, right? The Springboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand the question, and I don't have one within arm's reach to try it, but I'm not sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I believe Springboard only rotated like on that first version. Um, and, but, But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you still on the, on the Plus phones, you, and I believe on the Air too, you still have like if you rotate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like Apple Mail, you'll get the sidebar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, but like, I think the reason they don't do it in Springboard is because basically it moves everyone's icons. I will once
⏹️ ▶️ John again point out that all the people who are like railing against spatial interfaces, guess what the iPhone home
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is, man? It's a spatial interface. And if you move those icons, like if you rotate
⏹️ ▶️ John them and all of a sudden they rearrange like they do on the iPad, it is extremely jarring because people remember
⏹️ ▶️ John where they are by their position and appearance. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You feel better, John? Also from Stephen Robles, he put together a short
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video showing how, yes, the duo does support MagSafe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That's been stated after the keynote, but that may not be as great as we think it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be. And so his comparison was a couple of things. First of all, the iPhone Air and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way the camera plateau interacted, where it was in relation to the MagSafe thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But more importantly, Stephen got a pre-release version of, I forget who it was, but somebody's case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Duo. So this is a reasonable stand-in for what the Duo will be like. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was pointing out that a lot of MagSafe accessories, for example, batteries or wallets, are going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be just too darn tall for the duo. And so anything that's bigger than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a pop socket, you might need to replace or not use at all because there's just not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough surface area on the back of the duo to support something as big as a wallet or a battery or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's not so much that they can support it. It's just that they like the circle where the magnets are, fine, line up the circle where the magnets are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe that will fit. If you're unlucky, when you line up the two circles with the magnets, it won't lay flat because you'll be
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting on top of the camera plateau because it's so short and squat. But let's say, you know, it does lay flat
⏹️ ▶️ John on the circle. Is the rest of that magnetic device within the borders of the phone or is some part of it
⏹️ ▶️ John sticking out? It's kind of like this comparison was to the Apple MagSafe battery pack that was only
⏹️ ▶️ John for the air. Because if you took it and put it on another phone, it like hung off the bottom of the thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that's just a fact of life. Like MagSafe compatible, it was easy to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John and make that a reality when the phones were more or less the same proportion and there was just like a big one and a small
⏹️ ▶️ John one. You could make like, for example, a wallet accessory that worked on any iPhone with MagSafe,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the Duo is just such a different aspect ratio and size that I think it's just going to have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John duo specific accessories. You know, like don't, don't just buy a MagSafe accessory assuming it will fit on the back of your duo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like either measure it or, you know, have a good return policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. With regard to face ID, Pedro Fernandez writes, I don't think I've heard you mention it, but the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Duo, for the iPhone Duo to have Face ID, besides the challenge of fitting the hardware in such a thin device, it would require
⏹️ ▶️ Casey twice the hardware in an already expensive device.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only if you want it to be able to work open and closed, which there are features of the phone that only work open
⏹️ ▶️ John and only work closed. So yeah, but yeah, it's going to be a challenge. Hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John they make this a surmountable challenge, unlike the apparently unsurmountable challenge of putting face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID on a Mac. We just don't have enough room in the
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors to put a face ID scanner. Sorry, it can't fit. It's impossible. But maybe on this incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John thin phone in version three or four, they'll have face ID. And if they only put it in one spot, that's better than nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And honestly, like, I feel like most of the time you're unlocking the phone, wouldn't it start in a folded state?
⏹️ ▶️ John So don't you want to unlock on the folded one? I guess people want to take it out of their pocket, open it up and start using it. It's like, but wait, you didn't face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID yet. So yeah, twice the hardware would be great, but we'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. Yeah, this is one of those things, like in thinking about why doesn't have face ID, this never crossed my mind. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never even realized like, oh yeah, they would need two of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or would they? Like I said, maybe they just put it in one place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nah, they wouldn't do that. They would either put it both places or neither place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, speaking of the interview and speaking of the duo, there was a segment of that, I think it was the Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ John Jaws interview where the interviewer was asked about like, what about left-handed people? Isn't it going to be awkward? Like the stuff that Marco talked about
⏹️ ▶️ John last episode, people who use their phone with the left-hand. To be clear, Marco is not left-handed. He just uses his phone with
⏹️ ▶️ John his left hand. and the duo is ill-suited to that. And everyone's like, you know, like we said last week, why don't they flip it like the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Watch or whatever? There are problems with that as well. But right now, Apple doesn't support it. So that was the question posed to them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I forget the analogy, but it was something like, you know, look, we don't make like
⏹️ ▶️ John left-handed cars, right? Like, I mean, setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ John drive and stuff, like within the country, we just put the steering wheel on one side. And whether you're lefty or righty, back in the days
⏹️ ▶️ John of stick shift, you're using the stick shift with your right hand, with left-hand drive or whatever. The gas pedal is always on the
⏹️ ▶️ John right. It doesn't matter if you're righty or lefty, right? The brake is always to the left of the gas pedal. um even on
⏹️ ▶️ John right hand drive, the brake is the left of the gas pedal. So they they had other examples too. I forget what they were.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm just remembering a car one, but like that there are products that are just they're just made the way they're made
⏹️ ▶️ John and your handedness is, you know, you have to, you just have to pick. And this is just the way this product works. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that's easy to say, the hegemony of the right-handed people, right? But uh I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess that's their answer for now until and unless they have the version of iOS that allows you to
⏹️ ▶️ John flip it and mirror it. But as a lot of people pointed out, when you do flip and mirror it, lots of controls are in really
⏹️ ▶️ John weird places, including things like the cameras and stuff They're like now in the bottom instead of the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the volume buttons are in weird places. So I think Margot was more right in that people will essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John adapt to this. I wish I could remember their other analogy, but they were giving analogies of like devices that are
⏹️ ▶️ John directional that people just get used to. I guess, you know, again, cars is the only one I could think of,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I'm sure there are more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk Apple Pencil support. I know we talked about this a little bit just a moment ago, but let's talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some more. Julie Clover over at MacRumors writes, it's likely the iPhone Duo doesn't support the Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro because there's no magnetic surface for charging the pencil. The Apple Pencil Pro charges magnetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when connected to a compatible iPad, while the Apple Pencil with USB-C charges with a USB-C port hidden behind a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sliding cap. Then Gruber points out, charging is the least of the problems. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Duo doesn't have the magnetic attachment for the Pencil Pro, there's no way to even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pair a Pencil Pro. Yep. And Steve Trout and Smith also adds in,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also let's not forget that the USB-C Apple Pencil doesn't have pressure sensitivity, so the artists are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey likely posting their, already, excuse me, posting their disappointed reactions. I feel like this backs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up the Gurman report that they were planning to create a bespoke Apple Pencil for the iPhone Duo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that later got canceled, and perhaps the USB-C version is the fallback. I think they should just make a standalone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey universal pairing or charging dock for the Apple Pencil Pro and be done with all of this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nonsense, just like the AirPods case, to which Gruber also added, the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line is that Apple's entire pencil compatibility story remains a mess. True that.
⏹️ ▶️ John When they do a teardown of this thing, we'll probably be able to see if this rumor about, oh, they planned a special pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John is true, because there's probably like the little places for where the magnets would go. I forget where there was some recent device where you could see
⏹️ ▶️ John where they meant to put the magnets or things for a pencil or whatever where they just weren't there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was that the 16e with the MagSafe magnets, maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought maybe it was an iPad, but I don't remember. Anyway, like if, you know, if it's not a decision that was made four
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago, we'll be able to see evidence of it. But, you know, the third parties will surely make stubby
⏹️ ▶️ John little pencils that are a better fit for the iPhone Duo. I do wonder if there's a way to attach them to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I'm sure third parties will come up with something clever, but if there actually are little magnets in the edges, that would
⏹️ ▶️ John be great. But yeah, Apple's pencil strategy is just so, so weird. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the feature sets are different. The way they pair is different. They made that pencil. is like, look, it doesn't have like no silly cap, no
⏹️ ▶️ John plug. It's just magic and it goes in the side of your iPad. It's like, yeah, but if you're, if you don't have an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want to use that pencil, you've got a problem. I mean, I don't even think that thing would fit on the side of like where the,
⏹️ ▶️ John where like the magnets are, would even fit on the side of the duo. So maybe they'll sort this out depending on
⏹️ ▶️ John how popular the pencil actually turns out to be with the duo. But right now, it just kind of feels like they punted by
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, it supports the cheap kind of pencils that don't have pressure sensitivity. We
⏹️ ▶️ John sell you one of those. Good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think what we'll see is third party. I mean, the funny thing is, like the the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first Apple pencil with the happy to see you slash, you know, popsicle stick charging method,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually would work very well today with USB-C because like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, obviously, you know, you, could engineer one that doesn't have a cap that comes off and gets lost or that rolls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away. But thanks, Johnny. i've but um I'm sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third party, because as I mentioned last time, like third party pencils exist on Amazon for like 25 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they're they're all just usbc um But if they had the usbc
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh I guess, plug instead of the socket, they could theoretically like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug into the bottom of the iPhone and charge up a little bit to be usable. um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, same thing with the iPad. Like it would, it would have all the same problems as that original pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, with the exception of the cap loss, but you could have it with you and have nothing else with you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you could charge it with your phone. And so this is this seems like an obvious third-party opportunity for now. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe down the road, like, you know, they did a lot in this version one of the iPhone Duo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect that there's a lot that can be added later in subsequent versions. I mentioned earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, yeah, they're probably going to add better cameras at some point. You know, they're probably going to figure out if they want to do Face ID at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point. But yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if there's like an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Duo two or three down the road that supports a new pressure-sensitive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller Apple pencil at that moment, like that they would launch, you know, coincident with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Until then, this will be a third-party opportunity that I think will be very popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don't think the pencil will be that popular, but if it turned out to be insanely popular, they could always do the palm
⏹️ ▶️ John slash handspring thing and have the little pencil slot right into the device in a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco hole. That's so
⏹️ ▶️ John anti-Apple. They would never do that, but it would be funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What was amazing about that is that it was always with you. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, you're right.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would they would never in a million years.
⏹️ ▶️ John just be such a waste of space. People don't use it enough. It's so awkward. It's terrible. Like, there's a million reasons why it's a bad idea. But what
⏹️ ▶️ John I, having used those devices, it was convenient. It was, You always had the pencil and it wasn't magnetically stuck to the side or put
⏹️ ▶️ John through a loop in the case you had to put on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And like, it's funny, you know, all the devices now that use, like, all the e-ink tablets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that use styluses all the time, like as their primary or only input method, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they, they follow modern design principles of like the device should be super thin. And so none
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them have the pen in a slot, but they all have to then have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of ridiculous contraption to keep it held onto it somehow. And so some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them do the magnetic thing like the iPads, which of course it falls off constantly. And then they have to have a case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like has a strap that wraps around it to keep it on there. Or some of them will have like a loop that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to put it. Like none of them have solved this problem well. But nobody wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a device that's super thick. And also like, you know, the styluses that would go into your palm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pilot were very skinny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Incredibly uncomfortable. Like there's good reasons not to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I mean, they were only like probably about five inches long, but they were also like just super skinny.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of that was to fit in the body. Whereas now everybody wants their styluses to be the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco width as a pen or a pencil and you know, nice and long so the weight feels right and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there's lots of reasons why this is a difficult and generally unsolved problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there is no graceful solution. And certainly for Apple to have a pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the duo, there's going to be no graceful solution there either. But I think it'll be high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value enough that many people who, like the same kind of people who would carry around a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field notes notebook today, you're carrying a pen somewhere, you know, maybe a little pocket pen or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, something. I think they're just going to carry a separate pen in their pocket for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We'll see. There was something spotted by Benjamin Mayo over at 9to5Mac. Blogger Nicholas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Lelouch went digging in the iPhone Duo settings during his hands-on time with the device. He
⏹️ ▶️ Casey found a curious new option in the display settings called Shift Left Edge. When enabled, the setting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adds a bit of black border to the left side, essentially adding a fake bezel on the outside screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pushing content away from the folding edge. The description for this setting in the iPhone Duo software says that it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote, moves content when you are using a case that partially covers the left edge of the outer display of your iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hello, all screen 20th anniversary iPhone. Everyone's getting used to safe area insets at non-zero
⏹️ ▶️ John values on their left and right. How are they going to put cases on a phone that has a wraparound screen? Ding,
⏹️ ▶️ John ding, ding, ding, ding. I hope they, I mean, if they don't do this, they totally should, which is like, I've always wished they did
⏹️ ▶️ John something. Like they like no bezels. The screen goes edge to edge. Now the screen even wraps around a little bit. like but what
⏹️ ▶️ John if I want a case? Now the screen is hidden under the case. Well, good news. There should be something in settings that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can hit that takes the picture and just squishes it in so it's not under your case anymore. Because look, if
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen begins exactly where the case ends,
⏹️ ▶️ John that's an edge to edge screen. Like I'm great with that. So I know they did it on this one because it's like, look, well, it's folding
⏹️ ▶️ John and it's like kind of like at a sharp angle on the hinge side. And it's almost impossible to put a case
⏹️ ▶️ John on it without it blocking some pixels. So they built it and everyone's got to deal with safe area insets
⏹️ ▶️ John on the left and right on this phone anyway. So they put this option in there to move it and it just basically shoves the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John in, cuts off some pixels because that's where the case goes. I hope, I hope Apple doesn't think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is just a hack we had to do for the first generation iPhone Duo. I hope they also decide like
⏹️ ▶️ John a much smaller version of this would be incredibly beneficial to our edge-to-edge
⏹️ ▶️ John all-screen 20th anniversary phone that kind of sort of goes over the edges a little tiny bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It's a good thing I didn't just design a brand new app that has edge-to-edge table cells. Oh, crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you and I are not going to have a fun few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ John Once you're doing safe area insets on all four sides, the only thing you have to worry about next is safe area regions where it's not just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this is like rectangles
⏹️ ▶️ John cutting into your app. All right. Don't
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas, John. Oh, speaking of that, speaking of my app that I'm working on, like you
⏹️ ▶️ John know how the in macOS, things avoid the dock, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system and mission control and everything knows where the dock is so they don't put stuff behind it most of the time. I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ John private API, babies, can I do that? Unfortunately, the answer is that macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John supports one dock-like region like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, and it's for the dock. I'm like, oh, if only this API gave multiple regions, you know what
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean? Like a bunch of rectangles, but it's got essentially one safe area inset and it is only where the official macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John dock is. There is no way to give it multiple rectangles or regions or anything. like So hopefully that
⏹️ ▶️ John isn't coming for you folks over on the iOS side anytime soon. But yeah, once they have safe area insets
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere and you adjust your apps for it, Apple is free to do this with any of their phones.
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iOS 27.0 omissions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's talk iOS 27 omissions. As noted in Stephen Robles'
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS 27 review, the automatic agentic password changing feature is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the initial 27 release. Stephen also noted that the suggested action mini bubbles and messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also aren't in 27.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the agentic password thing, we talked about that on a past show of like people who had tried it and said it had like a low
⏹️ ▶️ John single digit percentage success rate. So that feature, I guess, was not ready for primetime.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do wonder if it will ever come out. Like what is going to change between now and 26.2 that's
⏹️ ▶️ John going to bring it from a 6% success rate to something that people would actually want to use? We'll see. You think it's going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John air-powered? Yeah. I mean, like, it always seemed really
⏹️ ▶️ John aggressive and optimistic that it was going to work. And Apple had all those papers and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John about like how they have research on training models to understand user interfaces and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is essentially what's required to like navigate a website and use it like a human would to find
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can go in and change your password and stuff. It's a hard problem. It's just ambitious is the word
⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking for. It just always seemed like a very ambitious feature. So I'm not shocked that it didn't make it into 27.0.
Photo libraries on externals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, photo libraries and external drives. Mike Brogan writes, For what it's
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth, I'm working with someone that has their photos library on an external drive. They see that message in preferences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the library not being searchable in spotlight. I wish Apple was clearer on what this means: searching the library
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the photos app for objects, places, people, et cetera, all works fine. I can search for quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mountains and boom, I get all sorts of results. And then Jason apparently has some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other information. Jason Snell, I'm sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John He's got the answer. He's got the answer for Mike because Mike was wondering what the whole deal is there. Jason's got the definitive answer. As he
⏹️ ▶️ John pointed out to me over messages, he does write a how to use Apple Photos book every year, so he knows this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason writes, spotlight and photos search are not the same. Searching for stuff inside photos is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spotlight. It certainly has been the case that searching photos is fine on an external drive until they broke it. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey main library has been on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John an external drive Unless they broke it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excuse me, unless they broke it. That's a very important difference. Thank you for catching that. My main library has been on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an external drive for ages, says Jason.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is good news for me because like the whole like, oh, your library is not searchable because X, Y, and Z,
⏹️ ▶️ John they're talking about spotlight search, like command F and finder, find images, blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, which I never use to look through my photos. So I'm, this is good news for me that like on
⏹️ ▶️ John an external drive, yes, you will see this message, but all it means is that your photos won't come up in spotlight. But I don't care.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm never, I don't even want my photos in spotlight results. If I ever want to find my photos, I'm going to launch the photos app
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I'm going to type mountains, pictures of fences, whatever, like whatever. And as long as that works,
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm good. So I'm happy with this.
Managing “Optimize Storage”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let's also talk optimized storage again. Jason Snell writes: The way that optimized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey storage works is it fills your drive until there's only 10% free. I got to stop Jason right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10%? I'm not saying Jason's wrong. I'm sure he's right, but 10%? That feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really aggressive to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I don't want
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell you what percentage full my drive has been for the past like four years. I don't want to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco about it. That would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like on my laptop, that would be 100 gigs. Like, that's not that bad. I mean, the problem is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever reason, you know, all the new indexing stuff or something in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 27 seems to not have that problem. And so it'll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just fill it right up. Like, I have had Mac OS 27 fill my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop all the way to full and to the point where apps start throwing errors at my disk as full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numerous times throughout the summer. So I don't know if that's fixed in the final version, but possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don't know. I feel like 10% is way too aggressive, but nevertheless, continuing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Jason. So after it's 10% free, then it will start opportunistically evicting files,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it is so slow that other apps, Xcode, can write to the drive so fast that it runs out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of room before the files get evicted. Fabrice Newman writes, I've been using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the following terminal command to force fill the disk with zeros. We're not going to share that command because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a terrible idea, generally speaking. But when the disk, Fabrice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey continues, when the disk is chock full and you get a message from Mac OS, you stop the command.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I understand correctly, as the disk is getting fuller, the system proceeds to delete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey caches and other temporary files. When the cat and mouse game is finished, because the disk is really full,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you wait a couple of minutes to make sure the system purged everything it could and then delete the large file you just created.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Bob's your uncle, you reclaimed lots of space. Well, it worked for me. Is it a good solution? Ugh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get it, but I don't love it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is really playing chicken with your computer. So he's using DD to make a giant file. And again, I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John not putting this command because you can really hose yourself by using DD in a variety of ways. Do not use DD unless you really know
⏹️ ▶️ John what you're doing and you probably don't. So don't use it. I don't use it because I don't.
⏹️ ▶️ John lot. This is like, I'm just going to fill the disk. And once I fill the disk, that whole thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John Jason just talked about, the optimized storage, because we're complaining, like if you put optimized storage on a photos library, it's like, yeah, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just ignores you and your disk gets full. It just takes it so it takes so long for it to notice that it needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to delete stuff. And then it's so slow to delete stuff because it's like a low priority background thread that your disk just gets full. So it's like,
⏹️ ▶️ John why don't I just force the issue? I'll just fill my disk with this big file full of nothing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then once macOS notices, oh, the disk is full, it will start evicting stuff. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say evicting stuff like crazy, but let's be honest. It will start evicting stuff at its leisure, at slow pace
⏹️ ▶️ John that it feels like doing. And the whole idea is like, uh you stop it. Like the problem is, if you ever do
⏹️ ▶️ John 100% fill your disk, bad things start to happen in macOS. Things will break. Things
⏹️ ▶️ John won't work the way you expect them. Various demons start getting no space left on device errors and bad
⏹️ ▶️ John things happen. It's not unrecoverable, but it's really pushing your luck on making
⏹️ ▶️ John something bad happen that you didn't want to happen. So the idea is you almost fill it and then you just sit around with a disk
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much almost entirely full and watching macOS evict stuff over, I don't know, hours or days.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you say, now finally, I'm convinced that it has deleted a bunch of stuff Then you delete your big empty file.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do not recommend this approach, but all this is to say that this Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John system of optimizing storage is not good and doesn't work well, which was our point last time. And I think all
⏹️ ▶️ John the feedback we've got about it has supported that. Even Jason telling us how it works with the 10% threshold.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that's great and all, but it's too slow to evict files. And it's very easy to outrun it
⏹️ ▶️ John by creating files. And so you're back to the same situation, which is my disk is full and I don't know how to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like every part of this is it's it's like me with the magazine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not wanting a setting screen. It's like in order to avoid Apple having to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a setting to say how much disk space to use for your photos library, they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to do all of these like, oh, just magical, automatic, don't think about it kind of features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in this context, it just doesn't work well enough. it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need some kind of like adjustable limit or just a much lower
⏹️ ▶️ John big button that says delete stuff that you can delete now. Right. And tell me when you're done and how much you
⏹️ ▶️ John deleted. Like how much is available to purge? How much do you want me to purge? Purge it all? Like just something,
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting there with your fingers crossed going, boy, I hope something's happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. and Or I hope something might happen soon someday. Like, and we've seen, you know, like there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in the Photos app, there's been over the years, like you'll, you just have to like wait for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco syncing sometimes. And sometimes it just wouldn't sync and you would have no idea that it wasn't syncing and no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John analysis, all the, all
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, launch the app, but then don't use it, but then quit it, but then don't let the computer go to sleep. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe at some point it will
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco decide to start
⏹️ ▶️ John doing face analysis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And like, you know, eventually over time, they have very occasionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added like a button or a label telling you what's happening or allowing you to say sync now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. um And the reason they've had to add those is because like it's just a complex problem and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can't just hand wave it all away with magic. And I think the amount of space that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opportunistic space thing uses on the Mac, it's obviously the same class of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem of like, it's just too difficult to do something magical all the time that'll work for everybody. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of control is needed.
John’s S3 setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, tell me about your S3 setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people had questions about this because I talked about it, I think in an after show in another episode, about how I was saving money.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got rid of B2, which is Backblaze's S3-like storage, where I was backing
⏹️ ▶️ John up my Synology to B2. And I decided to back it up to S3 in order to save money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it took me three months to get it all sorted out, but I eventually did. And everyone wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to know, so what's the secret? What's your setup? And I sent this to a bunch of other people who
⏹️ ▶️ John asked about it directly, but we'll link it in the show notes. Some statistics on what I'm backing up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm backing up a very small number of files in the grand scheme of things. It's only 86,000 files, which sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, but it's about five terabytes. So 86,000 files making up five terabytes tells
⏹️ ▶️ John you that a lot of those files are big. So it's pretty easy. So if you have different data that's a
⏹️ ▶️ John different shape, you have many smaller files or whatever, like your numbers won't be the same as mine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And nearly all of that five terabytes that I'm backing up there are in Glacier Deep Archive,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the cheapest, slowest storage tier where you can't even get the file out without like
⏹️ ▶️ John sending a letter by carrier pigeon and saying, hey, I'm going to want these files. So tell me in 24 hours
⏹️ ▶️ John when they're ready for me to pull. And then you pay money to pull them. Like it is very much send the files in and we'll
⏹️ ▶️ John keep them safe. But if you ever want them out, it's going to be a time-consuming and expensive proposition, which is exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John I want, the trade-off I want for a backup of last resort that I've never had to use. I want
⏹️ ▶️ John it to be there when I do have to use it, but the chances are that it's going to spend year after year of me never getting it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I want it to be cheap in the steady state while they're storing it. And I will gladly pay whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John they will charge for me to get the data back out if it is an emergency and I need it. OK, So everything is in
⏹️ ▶️ John Glacier Deep Archive, except the files that are less than 10 kilobytes, because it would be more expensive to
⏹️ ▶️ John put them in Glacier Deep Archive because of their weird pricing. So it's cheaper to store the 10 kilobyte
⏹️ ▶️ John files in S3 standard, not in S3 Infrequent Access or one of the other tiers
⏹️ ▶️ John because it's only the minimum storage things. And if it's a small file, it might get deleted. And so if I put them in, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is how it works out. And my configuration, which we'll link in the show notes, you can see my S3 lifecycle
⏹️ ▶️ John JSON file that I send up with the AWS command line, which is an AWS's inscrutable
⏹️ ▶️ John format. It's probably a nicer or at least uh better documented cloud formation
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you could use for this. The only thing you can't put on that JSON file is
⏹️ ▶️ John the transition default minimum object size, which is set to varies by storage class.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that can be put into one big command. And hopefully Casey put this giant command into the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes, which is an AWS command line thing where it says, you know, AWS
⏹️ ▶️ John S3 API, put bucket lifecycle configuration You tell it the bucket name. You tell it the the lifecycle
⏹️ ▶️ John configuration file in an insane format where you can't just give it the file path, but you have to do a file colon slash slash slash
⏹️ ▶️ John URL because AWS. uh And then there's another option that says transition
⏹️ ▶️ John default minimum object size set to varies by storage class. um
⏹️ ▶️ John That's my setup. Is it the best, most optimal setup? I don't know, but I do know that it cost me like four
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks last month as compared to $36, which is what uh B2 was
⏹️ ▶️ John asking me. And I was shocked at how many people wanted to know all these nitty-gritty details. So I guess there's a lot of other people
⏹️ ▶️ John out there who are paying too much for their cloud storage and heard that I had saved a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I can't, again, I can't guarantee this setup will work for you because do you have 86,000 files for five terabytes?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like if your average file size is wildly different or if your access pattern is different than mine,
⏹️ ▶️ John this might not work. Again, my access pattern is send stuff up and literally never request it again unless
⏹️ ▶️ John something disastrous happens. So I'm optimizing for that. Your mileage may vary.
iPhone Air market share
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We were talking earlier about iPhone Air sales
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and market penetration and whatnot. And underscore David Smith, dear friend of the show, put together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his chart over of what Widgetsmith usage looks like. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Widgetsmith is so widely used that it's a pretty good stand-in for what the whole market probably looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I'm sure it's not exactly right, but it's probably, at least in spirit, correct. So underscore writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here's the iPhone 17 family data as a percentage of overall usage for Widgetsmith. The iPhone Air really struggled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to find market share. For comparison, the iPhone 16 Plus ended its first year at about 1.4%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Air 0.3%. Then Gruber took it upon himself to look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore's numbers and wrote, amongst all Widgetsmith users, if we only consider the 19.7%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Widgetsmith users using one of the 17 generation iPhones, the percentages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look like this. iPhone 17, 37%. iPhone 17 Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max, 30%. iPhone 17 Pro, 29%. iPhone 17e
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2%. And iPhone Air, 2%. I'm rounding a bit, but you get the idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't know why you're rounding, but yes, you are rounding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, 36.5, 29.9, 29.4, 2.5, and 1.5.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I'm so happy I did that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, the real, the real convincer, because like you're reading numbers, it's like, well, I don't know, numbers, numbers,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. He posted a chart, underscore posted a chart. And in the chart, you will see the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max. And you'll think this chart
⏹️ ▶️ John only contains those three phones. Because you're like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where are the other phones
⏹️ ▶️ John that you were talking about? I don't see them. They're about one pixel wide.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's why you're not seeing them. The 17E and the Air look like they're not on the chart
⏹️ ▶️ John because when you visualize the numbers that Casey just read, both with and without rounding, those
⏹️ ▶️ John products disappear. Now, I'm always saying that every phone can't be your best-selling
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. And I think they are, rumors are sticking with the Air. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Air just didn't get a lot of penetration. It kind of surprised me that 17e didn't get enough penetration. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John the example we talked about in the past about like, why don't they do the uh the MacBook Neo, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for phones? It's really hard to do that. Like they you would have to get the phone cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that it would be attractive to more than 2.5% of customers. Like it's not just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, everyone who buys the iPhone has lots of money. And so they all just want the expensive ones. The 17e
⏹️ ▶️ John just isn't cheap enough. I don't think it's a bad phone. I think it's a good phone. I think it looks great
⏹️ ▶️ John and it is cheaper than the other phones, but it is not cheaper in the same way that the Neo was cheaper. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that it makes people think, oh, I wasn't even considering a Mac laptop because they all cost $1,000, but you're
⏹️ ▶️ John telling me there's one that I can get for $600 bucks or, you know, like something that's considerably less than $1,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, setting beside RAM again that kind of messed this up. But before that happened, the the Neo
⏹️ ▶️ John made people sit up and notice because it was like they moved the Mac laptop into a different price class.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the 17e is not doing that, especially as compared to used iPhones and the other stuff that it's probably competing
⏹️ ▶️ John with. And the iPhone Air is like, I'm a brand new quote-unquote flagship phone that got
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of press in a keynote, and I'm selling substantially less than the 17e that apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody wants to buy. So it has not found an audience. um Although I will say 1.5%,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is 1.5% of iPhone 17 sales, but um Mark was saying like the foldables
⏹️ ▶️ John are at two percent overall, like worldwide share. And from what I've read, a substantial portion of that is in China.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the folding phone market in the US is probably a fraction of a fraction of that. uh But if the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John Air was 1.5% and the Duo doubles it at 3% of new iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John sales, that's a success, but it is also still invisible on this chart. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't I don't know how the Duo sales are going to shake out, but like, I think a lot of it depends on how many they
⏹️ ▶️ John can make because everything we hear about the manufacturing is that it's going slower than expected and they're having quality problems and blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. So it could be that they just can't make like however many they make, they sell and we don't know what the actual demand
⏹️ ▶️ John was. Uh, But yeah, the air is just, I look at these numbers and I think maybe the air
⏹️ ▶️ John is only selling enough to make it stick around for two generations and it'll
⏹️ ▶️ John end up in the other bucket with all of the failed as far as Apple concerns experiments. And
⏹️ ▶️ John underscore, I'm sure, has done these graphs in years past, but I would love to see like the, Marco did them with his numbers, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John the mini numbers, the mini numbers potentially being substantially larger than the air. And yet
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stopped making the mini, didn't they? That wasn't enough to keep the mini alive. So if the air is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John substantially worse, presumably Apple's gonna think that's not enough to keep the air alive. But there is new management
⏹️ ▶️ John in the house. So maybe terence has a different idea about how long to keep iterating on a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that is that has not found a big audience. uh Obviously, the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John market share numbers for the Mac Pro must have been worse than this, despite that rumor that we heard where they were ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was probably just BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that was. BS
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So the Mac Pro was canned, but you know, Ternus didn't make that decision. So maybe he'll just look at my shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John one day and be like, you know what? I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John I should bring that back. But that's always the question. How much does something need to sell for Apple to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John making it? And in the realm of the iPhone, numbers like the Air is having put it below
⏹️ ▶️ John that threshold or put it in the like the mini category of like, we'll make it for a few years. We'll see how it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it doesn't prove that it has legs. The duo is going to be in the same situation. It's going to have to fight
⏹️ ▶️ John for its life. It will have to, you know, they make the first one, the second one, maybe they make the third
⏹️ ▶️ John one, and they'll see what the numbers are. But yeah, this graph makes it so clear
⏹️ ▶️ John that most of the world is buying the quote-unquote normal phones when Apple releases a new crop
⏹️ ▶️ John of phones. And then there are the other phones that are also available and they're basically a rounding error.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it's also worth pointing out, too, like the iPhone 17e has only been out for six months, whereas the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone Air has been out for a year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John got that going against it as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So like the iPhone, the iPhone 17e has, you know, you know, nearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco double the market share of the Air in half the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John That's a good point. I mean, it's essentially cheaper. So again, you would expect the cheaper phone to sell more, but like it is, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing. Like you think, oh, the bargain phone, won't people rush to that one? It's not cheap enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you compare it to cheap Android phones, like it's still, it's still an expensive phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially around the world. Like, you know, if you look at different also, um, Since slacking on the air,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we've heard from a few people that apparently, especially outside of the US, I've
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard a lot of Europeans saying that the Air has apparently been heavily discounted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last six months or so, by hundreds of dollars equivalent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that also might be helping dump the Air inventory a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John We heard from somebody who had gotten a new iPhone Air very recently, and the manufacture date was 2025.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it might have been from like, the first batch. Like the HomePod phenomenon where they basically made one batch of HomePods four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago and they just kept selling them? Yes. And I looked, you know, in overcast stats, you know, comparing the E's,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do have the 17E at about, yeah, maybe about two-thirds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the air. So the 17E is worse than the air for me, but the 16E is substantially ahead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the air for me. It has like 25% more than the air. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granted, the 16e has been out, you know, a year and a half instead of a year, but it does kind of show like even in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast customers which skew higher end and nerdier and certainly American because overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not localized, even among overcast customers, like the air is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing well. And that's like that's who you would expect to, you know, for it to do well within.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, on the one hand, you could argue for the continued life of the air and being like, look, this is a high-end,
⏹️ ▶️ John exclusive, luxury product. It's very expensive. It's very fancy. And those are always going to have tiny market
⏹️ ▶️ John share, right? You know, how many cars does Lamborghini sell versus Volkswagen? They're the same company,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the numbers are very different because Lamborghini is more expensive and it's fancy and also thinner. So
⏹️ ▶️ John then you'd say for the air, it's like, look, we never expected to sell a lot. It's always going to be the weird
⏹️ ▶️ John luxury thing that we sell a small amount of. And it's like our Halo car. It's like a
⏹️ ▶️ John sexy, cool, thin thing. So we should keep making it. On the flip side of that, you would say, well, the
⏹️ ▶️ John minis already sell better than it. And what what they're the niche they're filling
⏹️ ▶️ John is we don't have any small phones. The Air is not a small phone. It's just like in between two other phones
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have. It is not substantially different than those other phones other than the thinness and fanciness. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John the mini is getting customers that might never consider an iPhone because they just don't want a phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that big. But then, of course, the Mini has terrible battery life because it's really small. And part of the reason the Air is the size it
⏹️ ▶️ John is is so they can fit all the battery behind it. So I've in the past made strong arguments that they should keep making
⏹️ ▶️ John the mini because as I said, not every phone can be your best-selling phone. And like the mini fills a role
⏹️ ▶️ John that it like, there's nothing in the lineup like the mini. All of the phones are big and getting bigger all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the mini is like, here's my selling proposition. I'm small. The air selling proposition is I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit thinner, but basically the same size. And actually I'm kind of big, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe how many times am I going to mention silicon carbon batteries? Like they're not a miracle, but let's say solid
⏹️ ▶️ John state batteries. At some point in the future, when we can get decent battery life out of a mini size phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple better bring it back for another try.
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what experiments they'll have in flight then? Because they've done the plus phone experiments. They've got the e-phone experiments that are
⏹️ ▶️ John ongoing. They've done the air. They're going to do another air. they got the duo. like I hope they keep trying these things, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John should go back to the mini well when they can make one of those that has battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John that is acceptable. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Claude, ZocDoc, and Granola. And thanks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week in Overtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we're going to be talking about the rumored changes, and I think real changes, to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store, including the triumphant return of the genius bar. We're going to be talking about that. And overtime, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can join to listen, at atp.fm slash join. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Cause it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann it was accidental. And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's KC
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, E-N-T, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann accidental. They didn't mean to accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann accidental. Check podcast so long.
Preparing the way
⏹️ ▶️ John So, my new computer is coming soon. Let me look at the calendar. Will it be here by next episode?
⏹️ ▶️ John It will be. In theory, it will be here by next episode, although my desk may be in chaos as I try to set
⏹️ ▶️ John it up the day before recording a podcast. But, you know, we'll see what happens. At the very least, it
⏹️ ▶️ John might be in the house in a box on the floor next to me. So, I'm preparing the way as I do for my new computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to hear more about that. So, you're preparing the way to convert from a giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro tower to a Mac Studio, which obviously is much smaller. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, remind me, is the Mac Pro Tower on your desk or is it on the floor?
⏹️ ▶️ John it's on a It's on its own specially sized desk
⏹️ ▶️ John desk. It's like a little table, so it's up off the ground because my last Mac Pro got dented by the vacuum cleaner,
⏹️ ▶️ John not by me. um And so this one, I'm like, there's no way in hell I'm putting this on the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ John It's too nice and too expensive to be on the floor. So it's up on a little pedestal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, like how far off the floor are we talking?
⏹️ ▶️ John uh I don't know. It's like maybe a foot lower than my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, all right. So that's, first of all, it's adorable. That's like you get those little purse chairs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in really fancy restaurants?
⏹️ ▶️ John i I did. Well, this actually ties into the story because I think I talked about in the show. When I got my Mac Pro, I
⏹️ ▶️ John knew I wanted to put it there and I knew I didn't want it on the floor, but I also didn't want it like like I put it on
⏹️ ▶️ John my desk next to my computer, the monitor when I first got it. And I was like, that's not, it's too,
⏹️ ▶️ John used to have my towers on my desk, but it's too much. So I needed it to be a little bit lower. So I had to find a table that exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John fit in the space between the end of my desk and the baseboard heater that is
⏹️ ▶️ John against the wall. Like it's, So I had to find a table exactly the right depth,
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the right width with legs that straddled my UPS. Like it was very specific. So I had to go on
⏹️ ▶️ John this search for a table and you just find out how many they search these search sites. Like, can't you just let me search
⏹️ ▶️ John by dimensions? Like, no, no one searches by these many dimensions with this level of precision.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did find probably the one and only table in the entire world that matches the materials and dimensions that
⏹️ ▶️ John I needed. And that is what my Mac Pro is on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So to prepare the way for a Mac Studio, do you temporarily run them both at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same time for a little while? Like, do you just, like, where does the Mac, where does the Mac Pro go?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it leave this giant gaping hole behind? Like, are you going to put like a potted plant there? Like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John My current plan is the Mac Pro does not move because I have plenty of space on my desk
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac Studio. So I'll put the Mac Studio on the corner of my desk and the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John will stay there. I may, if I can find a KVM that works, I'll use it. But honestly, I'll probably just take the cable and yank
⏹️ ▶️ John it out of the studio and stick it into the Mac Pro when I want to switch. Oh, so you're going to actually keep using
⏹️ ▶️ John the Pro? Not going to keep using it, but it's going to, first of all, it's going to stay there. Whether it's on or off,
⏹️ ▶️ John it's going to stay there as kind of a piece of sculpture or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John but for the in the short term, it's there because like, oh, I forgot that one thing on the computer or whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, it is, it is a form of backup and it is also for my Mac OS 15 testing for my apps. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John also, it becomes my Mac OS 15 test machine, you know what I mean? So it will stay there for the foreseeable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know that VNC is a thing that exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. That's what I'll do, screen sharing. Um but the what the thing that I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do for preparing the way is, okay, so I have this Mac Studio, but the Mac Studio has
⏹️ ▶️ John no internal expansion. And I have stuff inside my Mac Pro that I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John take out of my Mac Pro and continue to use, like my time machine backup drive, like my Super
⏹️ ▶️ John Duper clone drive. I want to pull all that stuff out. And plus I also have
⏹️ ▶️ John my external photos drive that we talked about. It was all the issues of like, what do I care about how photos behaves
⏹️ ▶️ John on external drives? Because I had to buy a four terabyte Mac Studio and i'm going to
⏹️ ▶️ John I'm going to take my Photos library and put it on a four terabyte external for a total of eight terabyte storage, split up into two pieces.
⏹️ ▶️ John So right away, I have three drives that I'm going to connect to a Mac Studio.
⏹️ ▶️ John Time Machine Backup, Super Duper Clone, Photo Library.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I'm picturing like the Mac Pro as the base and then the Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco centered on top of the Mac Pro and then like a pile of drives centered almost like the Empire State
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Just drives like stacked on top of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would never do that. I would never put anything on top of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do have the problem of where do I put those drives? Because I will tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Time Machine and Super Duper drives, those were really, really inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ John SATA SSDs because they're connected to the SATA internal SATA connectors
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro. So they were bought a long time ago. Incredibly slow. so that interface
⏹️ ▶️ John is incredibly slow, but like what do I care for like Time Machine or whatever? like I don't care that it's slow. They're SSDs, so there's no noise
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know so on and so forth, but they're incredibly slow. So it's easy for me to find enclosures for them because like
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares like Bus speed doesn't mean anything. like they're just They're fine. Obviously, I got the expensive fancy Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John 5 enclosure for my photos library because that's like live storage that I'll actually be using. Maybe I did
⏹️ ▶️ John a little overkill there, but that's what I got. um But physically speaking, where do
⏹️ ▶️ John I put three SSDs, two of which are in 2.5-inch SSD, like the little
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic cases like that are shaped like old 2.5-inch drives with the SATA connectors? So if two of those.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have SATA connectors on them. I can't even like plug them directly in. So I have to get like enclosures or something for those to
⏹️ ▶️ John go in. And then I have my OWC metal heatsink Thunderbolt 5, 4
⏹️ ▶️ John terabyte, you know, very fast SSD thing. I don't want them sitting on my desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John They're all ugly. So what do I do with them?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You're going to put them under your desk like you did Tina's studio is what you're going to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they're, they're a problem. So first of all, the Mac Studio might end up under the desk. If it's noisy, I might banish
⏹️ ▶️ John it because I have done that with Tina's.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I am so glad that I don't have all of your idiosyncrasies because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know you have so
⏹️ ▶️ John many fans going in your room. You don't care. You have a fan in your ceiling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a fan on my ceiling. Oftentimes I have a fan sitting under my main display blowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on me because this room gets so hot because of all the aforementioned fans within it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it's fine. It doesn't matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, I don't want them on my desk. The first thing I had to do was find somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John to put the 2.5-inch drives. And I had the idea of like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John these things are slow. I should be able to find something cheap to narrow this problem. Can
⏹️ ▶️ John I find an enclosure that fits two 2.5-inch SATA drives? And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can. So I got an enclosure that fits two 2.5-inch SATA drives and connects through whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John Piddly USB connection they need for their like five gigabits per second or whatever the hell. Like the enclosure does 10 gigabits
⏹️ ▶️ John and each of the drives is five gigabits, right? So I have an enclosure that just fits, it's
⏹️ ▶️ John bus powered, a bus powered enclosure that fits two 2.5 inch SATA drives. And since
⏹️ ▶️ John these are SSDs instead of spinning disks, the bus power will be adequate, right? Although it does have external power supply if I need
⏹️ ▶️ John it. but So I've got that. And that is literally size, the size of two 2.5 inch SATA drives.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, Then I have my little OWC thing, which is kind of the size of one of those M.2
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD sticks of my you know, Samsung 990, whatever the hell it is. right So
⏹️ ▶️ John that's where I need to stash. I need to stash a rectangular thing as big as two 2.5-inch
⏹️ ▶️ John drives and a narrow rectangular thing that's kind of like a heat sink with
⏹️ ▶️ John my big drive in it. I can't put them under the desk easily because the back of my desk
⏹️ ▶️ John has a metal sheet that that extends from the top of the desk down
⏹️ ▶️ John the back. You ever see those like office? This is an ancient.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, they're
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called modesty shield or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like if you're using
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it in an office so
⏹️ ▶️ John that like people can't see your legs under the desk, it's a metal thing. It doesn't go down to the floor, but it goes like halfway
⏹️ ▶️ John down to the floor. And that has no holes in it and is like up against the top edge.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could cut holes in it, but like I'm not going to be cutting holes in metal in my desk or whatever. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, I don't, The one way I do this is there are holes in top of the desk. That's how old this desk
⏹️ ▶️ John is, where I take my keyboard, like cable and stuff like that that goes under the desk, get it stapled
⏹️ ▶️ John to the top of the desk or whatever, not staple, but you know what I mean? Velcroed or hooked to the top of the desk and it comes up through
⏹️ ▶️ John the hole. You know what I mean? I can do that. And so I probably could make the cables go from the Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John into the hole and then find someplace under the desk to stick them. But that's not particularly convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ John And especially since I want to put the Mac Studio on the corner of the desk, it would be covering the hole that the cables go through. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John had to fish the cables under the Mac Studio, where it's supposed to be getting the cool air from. And it's just.
⏹️ ▶️ John So my idea was, because my desk is against the wall, why don't I do the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the the time-tested thing that you used to do with laptops where you just Velcro drive to the back of the lid,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Yeah. I was like, why don't can't I just stick these drives to the back of my
⏹️ ▶️ John desk, like the Millennium Falcon on the back of the Star Destroyer and Empire Strikes Back? I'm
⏹️ ▶️ John like, that would be great because like then the cables would would leave the Mac Studio, go down the back of my desk
⏹️ ▶️ John and plug into drives that are essentially stuck to the back of my desk where nobody can see them because it's against the wall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can't see them from the front because the metal modesty shield thing hides them. uh That's what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I solve this problem when I have my time machine drives. I just have, i like all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desks have some kind of like big like cable holding gutter thing like
⏹️ ▶️ John under on the underside of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John just put them there. It's fine. Yeah, modern modern desks have that, but this is a really old desk. It does not have anything like that
⏹️ ▶️ John underneath it. And so someone in the chat room says, too bad John doesn't know someone with a 3D printer. Well, as Marco already knows from looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes, this after show item is labeled as John needed Marco's 3D printer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I'm looking at this, I'm like, okay, so how do I stick these drives to the back of my desk? I'm like,
⏹️ ▶️ John is a job for a 3D printer. Because you make little brackets or something. You'd make them exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John size to your drives. You'd put them wherever you wanted them to be. You know, you could have them clip
⏹️ ▶️ John over the edge of the desk or you could stick them with stuff or whatever. Like 3D printer.
⏹️ ▶️ John I finally have a reason in my life that I would need a 3D printer, but of course I don't have one. I'm not particularly interested in
⏹️ ▶️ John buying one, but I'm like, look, if I was Marco, I would 3D print brackets for this and I would be done and they would be exactly suited
⏹️ ▶️ John to my, like your little things you made for your little Yolink stuff, exactly size for this specific purpose. That's what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Literally right now, my 3D printer is printing a, like, you ever see like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a shelf and you have, you want to have like a divider that goes vertically from the shelf
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they have like, you know, different ones you can like clip on that, that just like, you know, clip on at the end of your shelf
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just have like a thing that sticks up. Well, in my closet, like the shelves in my closet that we like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put clothes on are pretty shallow because it's like built into like this weird like diagonal roof
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eave thing. And so like none of the ones on Amazon fit. So I just custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modeled my own divider and my 3D printer is right now printing some dividers that will perfectly fit my
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And the other advantage this has is, especially if you don't have a good 3D printer, which I'm sure Margo has a good one,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann don't have a good
⏹️ ▶️ John you're like, oh, you can see the lines, or I don't want to wait for like a print where it's all smooth and I don't want
⏹️ ▶️ John to sand it after. No one's going to see this. Again, it's behind the desk, between the desk and a wall. It's totally invisible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of like my 3D printed bracket that is holding my wife's Mac Studio under her desk. It's very ugly and you can see all
⏹️ ▶️ John the lines on it, but no one sees it. It's under a desk. That's the whole point. But I don't have a 3D printer. So what I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John do was employ the exact same skill that I used when I found that perfectly sized little
⏹️ ▶️ John table for my Mac Pro, which is I'm going to go online and I'm going to find a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John can fit these rectangles and stick them to the back of my desk. And the question is, what kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John thing are you getting? Like, I don't know. I just know the dimensions. You know, it has to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John this big, have this much surface area for me to use a sticky 3M thing because these things are not particularly heavy. So just some sticky
⏹️ ▶️ John like 3M stick them thingies from like the, you know, little, I have plenty of that from
⏹️ ▶️ John setting up people's dorm rooms in college. You know what I'm talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was going to ask about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the way I solve this problem is I just use command strips like the
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that's what it is, name brand. I couldn't remember it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not like the regular ones. They have the command strips that makes a version of it that is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two-sided with Velcro between them. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And those I find tend to hold the like the most weight if you're just like sticking something under a desk.
⏹️ ▶️ John they're way overkill. They hold like 50 pounds or something. Again, I use them in setting up kids' dorms rooms and they like hang tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff off them. And I have a bunch of them, although honestly, a lot of them are with my daughter now because we just moved her in.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the mounting…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So why don't you just stick the drives directly with the command strips to the desk?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don't want to, but stickers, even command strips, I don't want to stick them on the back of my drives. I mean, it may come to that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don't think it will because I used my skills and found things that hold
⏹️ ▶️ John my devices that will let me mount them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the first thing I found was, I don't know what you would even call these. I spent so long
⏹️ ▶️ John looking for like bracket, clip, mount, whatever. But apparently there's a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where if you want to have a laptop so that it is like mounted under a desk
⏹️ ▶️ John in a slot, but it's not actually a slot. Instead, it is just two rails that the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you're thinking of.
⏹️ ▶️ John There's a million of those. And I found one of them that is exactly the right width for my two Sata
⏹️ ▶️ John Bay thing. And it comes in two pieces, the left rail and the right rail. So I can put them at any distance from each
⏹️ ▶️ John other that I want to exactly fit my thing. And it's padded on the inside because you're supposed to put laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. And what it means is that if I ever need to like take that thing out or mess with it, I don't need to unvelcro it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don't need to unstick it. I can just pull it out of the slot, like it's a like a vertical slot. So that solves that
⏹️ ▶️ John one. And then for my little metal thingy, I found two tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ John L-shaped brackets that come with their own sticky thing, which I might use instead of command strips because they're just little
⏹️ ▶️ John L-shaped, not L-shaped, like, I don't know, like J-shaped brackets that
⏹️ ▶️ John the drive sits in. And again, if I ever want to mess with it, I just reach behind the desk and
⏹️ ▶️ John pull it out from the little thing that it's sitting in. And so that is my plan for my solution
⏹️ ▶️ John for where I'm going to put external drives. They're going to be in their own little custom non-3D
⏹️ ▶️ John printed plastic and metal bracket thingies. I don't even know what the J-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John brackets are made for. I just know they are correctly sized and have plenty of surface area for a
⏹️ ▶️ John sticky thing to go on the back of my desk. Getting them in there will be me laying on my back, reaching
⏹️ ▶️ John up behind the thing to try to get them, you know, with a headlight on my head or whatever. But that's my current
⏹️ ▶️ John plan. We'll see how it works out. If it turns out that the Mac Mini of the Mac Studio itself gets banished onto the desk, I
⏹️ ▶️ John may have to rejigger things a little bit, but one thing at a time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, it's adorable you thought that this was going to be quick.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco made it longer, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, yeah, it's all Marco's mind. He did. He had
⏹️ ▶️ John questions. He asked me about my Mac Pro, what my plans are, the little table It happened to be relevant.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could have raced through that without Marco asking me for more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I can't tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you're being sarcastic, but
⏹️ ▶️ John asked, He asked questions that were relevant to the topic and extended it substantially.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So, Marco, please feel free to tell me what portion of that episode was, or that post-show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was you speaking versus what portion of it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Not him speaking.
⏹️ ▶️ John He asked me questions, then I had to answer them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mhm. Sure. The only thing that I would add is um, I did, uh, take a quick look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now that I know more about 3D printing, I took a quick look at the under desk mounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Mac Studios that everybody was buying a couple years ago. I had one question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my head. What direction did they run the layer lines?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I was afraid that they would run them horizontally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is the weakest layer bond for something that would be mounted under a desk pulling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downward. And sure enough, every single one of them on Etsy that I can see the layer lines
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it's easiest to print it, though, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it is. But I would never in a million years trust that to hold up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a $6,000 plus heavy metal computer under my desk for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years, especially one that's constantly producing heat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so I think I described this when I got Tina's under desk mount for her Mac Studio,
⏹️ ▶️ John in fact a layer line visible. I think they are horizontal. And I also didn't trust it
⏹️ ▶️ John from day zero. So that 3D printed mount that her Mac Studio is in is screwed
⏹️ ▶️ John into the bottom of the desk and the Mac Studio is in it. But then I bought steel cables
⏹️ ▶️ John with screws in the ends. I like to go under it. And looped the steel cables under
⏹️ ▶️ John it so that basically the steel cables alone would hold it. And those steel cables are screwed at both
⏹️ ▶️ John ends. So if that 3D-printed case blinked out of existence,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio would fall one half a centimeter and be suspended by three steel cables.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That's Yeah, that's smart. Yeah, Cause like basically like layers come apart from each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other much more easily than like the plastic breaks in the other dimensions. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Layer separation is the weakest point. So you would want this to be aligned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other way. You, you, You want the layer lines to be vertical or at worst diagonal. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could design the part to print that way. It's you know, it's a harder thing to design, but you could do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they didn't do that here. So that's terrifying.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they sell commercial products that are actually like injection molded or metal or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you don't have to buy 3D
⏹️ ▶️ John printed ones anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John did underdesk mount, I would probably just shop for commercial products and not a 3D printed thing from Etsy like I got for her. But remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John she got the M1 Max Mac Studio. It was brand new. There was no underdesk mounts except for the Etsy people.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I'd say it's been in there since day one of the M1 Max Studio. And so far, the 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. Well, good. Plus your steel cable support.
⏹️ ▶️ John I've got steel cable insurance. It's not going anywhere.